Ernil Sabaj

Assistant Professor (Teaching Focused) in Macroeconomics, Department of Economics, University of Warwick

I study when fiscal and monetary policy work, and why the answer depends on the state of the economy: how tight credit is, how high trend inflation runs, what kind of recession it is, and how slowly services wages reset. A newer strand looks at climate risk and public debt.

Before Warwick, I was an economist in the Department of Macroeconomics at the Albanian Ministry of Finance and Economy. I hold a PhD in Economics from the University of Exeter and an Erasmus Mundus joint master's degree from the universities of Antwerp, Staffordshire, Cantabria and Brasília.

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a mentor for Warwick's FHEA APP EXP pathway.

Academic CV

Policy CV

Google Scholar · ORCID · LinkedIn · X (Twitter) · Warwick profile · Email

journal articles since 2023

working papers

presentations of my papers since 2017

Questions behind my research

Each chart uses public data from FRED, last updated in September 2026, and sets up a question my papers try to answer.

What do tariffs do to prices and public debt?

U.S. customs duties rose from 2.6 percent of goods imports in 2024 to 11.3 percent in the last quarter of 2025, the highest since the series starts in 1959. Two papers in progress ask how tariff revenue, debt maturity and the speed of upstream price adjustment shape the inflation that follows.Data: FRED series B235RC1Q027SBEA divided by A255RC1Q027SBEA.

Why is services inflation so persistent?

Core goods inflation peaked in February 2022 and was below zero by September 2023. Services inflation peaked a year later and was still 3.0 percent in August 2026. My paper asks how much of this persistence comes from slow wage adjustment in services.Data: FRED series CUSR0000SASLE and CUSR0000SACL1E, change over 12 months.

Should governments invest or consume?

Government investment is 3.6 percent of U.S. GDP, about a fifth of government purchases, down from roughly 7 percent in the early 1960s. With Q. Wan I study when a dollar of public investment raises output more than a dollar of public consumption, and how financial intermediation changes the answer.Data: FRED series A782RC1Q027SBEA and A955RC1Q027SBEA, each divided by GDP.

Research interests

Macroeconomics

Fiscal and monetary policy

Business cycles

Macroeconomics of climate change

Papers and abstracts

Teaching

Module leader for EC916 Global Finance and EC956 Macroeconomics (WBS); from 2026/27 also EC134 Topics in Macro and International Economics.

Dissertation supervision on EC331 (undergraduate) and EC959 (MSc).

All teaching

Recent

Sep 2026

E. Abdulla presented our paper on climate change and sovereign debt sustainability at the 57th MMF Annual Conference, Lancaster.

Jun 2026

"Government Investment vs. Consumption", with Q. Wan, shortlisted for the Young Economist Best Paper at the 28th INFER Annual Conference, Bucharest.

Mar 2026

SUERF Policy Brief No 1382 on how the type of recession shapes labour mobility.

All talks

Google Sites

Report abuse