Fiscal Stimulus and Skill Accumulation over the Life Cycle 

Using micro data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey and Current Population Survey, I document that government spending shocks affect individuals differently over the life cycle. Young households increase their consumption after an expansionary shock while prime-age households reduce it, regardless of their level of income or debt. Productivity and wages increase significantly for young workers. To rationalize these findings, I develop a parsimonious New Keynesian life-cycle model where young agents accumulate skills on the job through a learning-by-doing process. An increase in government spending raises hours worked, which enhances skill accumulation, particularly among young workers who face a steep learning curve. The ensuing increase in the relative labor demand for young workers boosts their wages, thus stimulating their consumption. 

Short- and Long-Run News: Evidence from Giant Mineral Discoveries, with J-P. L'Huillier and K. Shakhnov

The bulk of the news shocks literature focuses on shocks materializing 4 or 5 quarters ahead. Moreover, there is little empirical evidence on news about longer-run events. We exploit a proprietary data set on giant mineral discoveries worldwide from 1950 to 2013. The median delay between the discovery of a mineral and its actual exploitation is 9 years. This is almost twice the delay reported in other commodity discovery data considered in the literature so far, and thus it allows to study news events with a longer horizon. We find that macroeconomic responses are delayed, with little or no action 3 years into the discovery. A news effect appears only two or three years before production starts, underlining an existing, but myopic, effect of giant discoveries on macroeconomic expectations. The benchmark model by Arezki, Ramey, and Sheng (2017) performs well in explaining this delay. We discuss other possible channels and implications for macroeconomics.

Publications

From He-Cession to She-Stimulus? The Labor Market Impact of Fiscal Policy across Gender, SERIEs 13, 309–334 (2022), with A. Bonk 

Men, especially those that are young and less educated, typically bear the brunt of recessions because of the stronger cyclicality of their employment and wages relative to women's. We study the extent to which fiscal policy may offset or worsen these asymmetric effects across gender. Using micro-level data for the U.S. from the Current Population Survey, we find that the effects of fiscal policy shocks on labor market outcomes depend on the type of public expenditure. Women benefit most from increases in the government wage bill, while men are the main beneficiaries of higher investment spending. Our analysis further reveals that the fiscal component most efficient at closing gender gaps is least suitable for offsetting inequitable business cycle effects across other socioeconomic dimensions.

Consumer Confidence Effects of Monetary Policy Stance

Consumer confidence is partly determined by households' expectations of future economic conditions, which can be influenced by monetary policy. In this paper I investigate the implications of this fact for monetary policy stance. Using a non-linear VAR, I find that a contractionary monetary policy shock has a stronger negative impact on macroeconomic variables in the loose regime than in the tight regime. Furthermore, a counterfactual decomposition shows that regime-dependent effects on confidence partly explain these differences. These findings suggest that the influence of monetary policy stance on consumers' expectations is critical to understanding how monetary policy affects business cycles.