State-owned Sector and the Effectiveness of Monetary Policy in China

Based on a standard two-sector New Keynesian sticky price model, we show that the response of sectoral output share to a monetary policy shock can be used to assess the relative price stickiness between the state-owned and private sectors in China. Specifically, the output share of the sector with more price stickiness increases to a positive monetary shock. A structural VAR analysis on the Chinese industrial data confirms that the price is stickier in the state-owned sector. This result implies that the real effect of monetary policy at the aggregate level in China would diminish along with the potential decline of the state-owned sector.