Characterizing Monetary Regime Switches in Romania

In this study it was analyzed the behaviour of Romanian's Central Bank in setting its main monetary objectives. More exactly, I used a Markov Switching approach to identify the transition between preferences in putting weights to minimize its loss functions. Therefore, according to current conditions of economy, the monetary interest rate, modelled as a Taylor- rule style, was adjusted in order to target some levels for inflation and output-gap. The Taylor-rule model used here is defined by movements in output-gap, inflation, returns in exchange rate and AR(1), while the switches were set only for the first two components according to the classical form of loss function of monetary institution. In regard with the topic related to the variables which enter in the loss function, I extended the classical approach and obtained some information on the weight of exchange rate through the set of an addition switch on its returns. In this paper I engaged an ergodic parametrisation of the Markov Chain and its parameters were obtained through the maximization of the log-likelihood function.