Publications
Energy price shocks, Monetary policy and Inequality (with Alina-Gabriela Bobasu, Amalia Repele) [SSRN, ECB WP] European Economic Review (2025)
We study how monetary policy shapes the aggregate and distributional effects of an energy price shock. Based on the observed heterogeneity in consumption exposures to energy and household wealth, we build a quantitative small open-economy HANK model matching salient features of Euro Area data. Our model features energy as both a consumption good for households with non-homothetic preferences as well as a factor input into production with input complementarities. Independently of policy, energy price shocks always lead to a reduction in aggregate consumption. Poor households are more adversely affected through both a decline in labor income as well as negative direct price effects. “Active” monetary policies raising rates in response to rising energy prices amplify aggregate outcomes through a reduction in aggregate demand but speed up the recovery by enabling households to rebuild wealth through higher returns on savings. However, poor households are further adversely affected as they have little savings to rebuild wealth from and instead loose due to further declining labor income.
Make-Up Strategies with Incomplete Markets and Bounded Rationality (with Rafael Gerke, Sebastian Giesen, Joost Roettger) [SSRN, Bundesbank WP], European Economic Review (2025)
We study the impact of market incompleteness and bounded rationality on the effectiveness of make-up strategies. To do so, we simulate a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) model with reflective expectations and an occasionally binding effective lower bound (ELB) on the policy rate. Our simulations show that make-up strategies can mitigate the negative consequences of the ELB for inflation and real economic activity. This result holds both for our HANK model as well as a corresponding representative-agent (RANK) model. However, the stabilization benefits of make-up strategies are quite small when agents’ cognitive ability is consistent with micro-evidence. This result is independent of market (in)completeness, emphasising the importance of rational expectations for make-up strategies. Furthermore, while market incompleteness and bounded rationality complement each other in attenuating the effects of forward guidance in our model, we do not observe such a complementarity with respect to the benefits make-up strategies.