Many central banks are discussing the introduction of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Empirical evidence suggests that households differ in their demand for a CBDC. This paper investigates the macroeconomic and distributional effects of different CBDC regimes within a New Keynesian model with a heterogeneous household sector. Households prefer to hold part of their income in CBDC as a means of payment as it facilitates transactions. If they cannot hold their preferred share of CBDC, they will face transaction costs. We find that the introduction of a binding limit on CBDC holdings can increase the shock absorption capabilities of an economy. If the limit is used as a monetary policy instrument, prices will be stabilized more effectively after shocks. However, a CBDC implies distributional effects across households.

This paper shows that considerable differences in inflation rates exist among households in the United States. Against this background, we theoretically show that a central bank that considers household inflation heterogeneity can stabilize overall inflation more effectively. Using a tractable, multi-sector New Keynesian model with a low- and a high-income household, we show that a central bank that reacts to the inflation rate of the household less affected by price changes can achieve lower deviations of all households’ inflation rates from their steady states. The reason is that a weaker central bank reaction dampens an adverse relative price elasticity channel of monetary policy, allowing for more favorable relative price adjustments. The strength of this channel depends on household heterogeneity.

Inflation rates differ across households depending on their sociodemographic characteristics. This paper calculates the inflation rates experienced by income quintiles in the US, the EU, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK between 2001 and 2021. The results indicate substantial inflation inequality between quintiles. Households with lower income experienced higher inflation rates than households with higher income. The aggregated inflation differential between the lowest and the highest quintile is always positive, with values up to 8.56 percentage points. One reason for this inequality is differing consumption baskets of households: essential goods, which exhibited above-average inflation, are more prevalent in the consumption baskets of lower quintiles, while non-essentials, which exhibited below-average inflation, are more relevant for higher quintiles. Upon examining inflation inequality across quintiles between January and June 2022, a similar pattern emerged in Europe. In the US, however, higher income quintiles experienced higher inflation rates in each month of 2022. 

Empirical evidence suggests that women are discriminated against in the labor market. We analyze the effects of taste-based and statistical gender discrimination on business cycle and inflation dynamics by including unpaid household production, two-agent households, and discriminatory firm behavior in a tractable New Keynesian model. After a negative demand shock, we find that the economic downturn is more severe in comparison to a non-discriminatory environment, as the shock implies an increase in the inefficient utilization of female and male productivity. Furthermore, the working time allocation between women and men becomes more inefficient. Moreover, we show that discrimination implies a lower transmission of expansionary monetary policy shocks on inflation. Overall, taste-based discrimination leads to larger macroeconomic distortions, while statistical discrimination implies higher intra-household inefficiencies. 

Several studies document high risk sharing against output fluctuations in the United States. Building on these studies, this note documents substantial heterogeneity in interstate risk sharing between US states. Using a panel data set ranging from 1963 to 2013, aggregate and state-specific risk sharing profiles are estimated. Moreover, four distinct clusters of states, each characterized by a unique risk sharing profile emphasizing one specific consumption insurance channel, are derived. This note then shows that this heterogeneity in insurance levels and profiles is related to differences in state characteristics, such as the composition of state output, insurance opportunities, vulnerability to idiosyncratic shocks, and the capacity to finance countercyclical policies.

The German hyperinflation in 1923 was caused by monetary financing of the highly deficient German state budget by a dependent central bank. The social and economic consequences of the hyperinflation were disastrous. Combined with an instable political atmosphere, paving the way for the rise of the Nazis, the hyperinflation is deeply etched in the German collective memory. It is this collective memory that shapes the current institutional framework of the ECB. While risk aversion and institutional imprint of the ECB’s policy makers differ, the ECB’s institutional framework ensures that current inflation will not evolve into a hyperinflation. 

Inflation rates in the euro area have reached historic highs due in large part to high energy prices. As the euro area is a net importer of energy, one refers to this inflation as imported inflation. There is a danger that these high inflation rates will become entrenched in inflation expectations. This would not only imply that high inflation rates will persist but it could also cause a dangerous upward price spiral. Consequently, the ECB should communicate more clearly and more credibly that it will counteract this danger and act accordingly as the costs of disinflation will remain higher the longer the ECB waits to act. 

In the euro area, monetary policy is conducted by a single central bank for 20 member countries. However, countries are heterogeneous in their economic development, including their inflation rates. This paper combines a New Keynesian model and a neural network to assess how the European Central Bank (ECB) weighted the inflation rates within the European Monetary Union (EMU) when conducting monetary policy between 2002 and 2021. Our findings suggest disproportional emphasis of the ECB on the inflation rates of EMU members that exhibited high inflation rate volatility for the majority of the time frame considered (60%). The median inflation weight of 57% on these countries is 22 percentage points higher than their share in consumption/GDP. In a counterfactual analysis, we show that the ECB’s interest rate deviated by more than 50 basis points from the interest rate implied by a reaction to the weighted average inflation rate in the EMU.

Large-scale asset purchases by a central bank (quantitative easing, QE) induce a strong and persistent increase in excess liquidity and deposits in the banking sector and, therefore, lead to an expansion of banks' balance sheets. In the euro area, excess liquidity and QE-created deposits are heterogeneously distributed across the member states. First, this paper uses local projection (LP) techniques to analyze the transmission of monetary policy to bank lending, conditional on a country's excess liquidity holdings. We find that in a high-liquidity country, such as Germany, an increase in the level of excess liquidity signicantly dampens the effect of a monetary shock over time, while the transmission is amplied for a low-liquidity country, such as Italy. Second, we shed some light on these results in a two-country New Keynesian model. We show that QE has two opposing effects on banks' costs: (i) QE decreases long-term interest rates and, therefore, banks' refinancing costs; (ii) QE-created excess liquidity and deposits expand banks' balance sheets and increase balance sheet costs. Furthermore, QE-created deposits are not loanable funds but banks create deposits when granting loans, implying that bank lending does not increase in QE-created deposits. These model features imply a reverse bank lending channel, which dampens the expansionary effects of QE and the contractionary effects of quantitative tightening (QT). These dampening effects differ across euro area countries.

Households differ in their consumption baskets and inflation rates along the wealth and income distribution. We use German data to show that subsistence consumption is a main driver of these differences: the share of subsistence consumption in overall consumption is significantly higher for households at the lower end of the wealth and income distribution. We construct a price index for subsistence consumption and show that this price index exhibits larger volatility than the price indices constructed for the average consumption basket and the basket of households with average and high income. We then set up a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model that incorporates these facts to analyze the consequences of different consumption baskets and inflation heterogeneity for monetary policy transmission. We find that heterogeneous consumption baskets across households weaken monetary policy transmission. This is due to the heterogeneous responses of inflation rates to monetary policy shocks across households, larger labor supply heterogeneity, and a novel indirect transmission channel of monetary policy operating through the real value of subsistence consumption.