DSGE-model for Russian economy with banks and firmspecific capital in coronavirus pandemic

The article presents a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE-model) for the Russian economy. The model describes the behavior of the following macroeconomic agents: households, real sector, banking sector, Central Bank, as well as the interactions between them and the world. Household modeling uses the external habit formation approach to account for the inertia of preferences. To model the real sector, we abandoned the most common approach which assumes that the decision on investments is made by the households as the owners of production factors. Instead, we took the firm-specific capital approach which assumes that the decision on investment is made by the firms themselves. The study also considers that in Russia, fixed assets are mostly invested from the firms' own funds. To account for the investment inertia in the fixed asset in a real sector model, the expenditures are transferred to the commissioning of new facilities, the Calvo model is applied to describe the price setting under the monopolistic competition. A banking sector which defines the loan and debt interest rates to the key Central Bank interest rate is chosen to be a link between the households and firms in the model. The Taylor equation is used to describe the monetary policy of the Bank of Russia under the inflation targeting, while an inertia factor is included into the equation with the uncovered interest parity for the budget rule which regulates the purchases (or sales) of the currency by the National Welfare Fund. The final linearized model is a system of 23 difference equations with rational expectations. Based on the proposed model, calculations were made and key macroeconomic indicators were forecasted for 2020-2021 on a quarterly basis for the Russian economy. The calculations account for the relevant recessionary factors: oil price fall, oil production cut in OPEC+ deals, quarantine measures aimed to prevent the spread of the corona virus infection, anti-recessionary measures of the RF Government. The findings show that the economic downturn in 2020 can be from 5 to 7% under COVID-19 pandemic. Growth in 2021 is estimated to be within 3-5%. The developed model can be used for scenario projecting for the Russian economy, upgrading the monetary policy of the Bank of Russia, and for developing applied quarterly projection models (QPM). The model could be further modified by including more elements: decomposing the household sector into the Ricardian and non-Ricardian ones, identifying the resources industries and industries in the real sector which manufacture the invested goods, including the key taxes and budget expenses into the model. One more promising area is to analyze the equilibrium of the interest rates when large firms could accumulate their own financial resources. This prerequisite decreases the demand for the bank loans from the real sector and, thus, leads to lower, including the negative, interest rates. The proposed approach enhances the quality of a DSGE model as a predictive tool for making the political and managerial decisions.