JLU/Katrina Friese
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Moritz Grebe
Moritz Grebe
Research Interests
Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy, Expectations, Natural Language Processing
Published Papers
Household Expectations and Dissent Among Policymakers
with Peter Tillmann, European Journal of Political Economy 86 (2025) 102638
Abstract: This paper studies the impact of dissent in the ECB’s Governing Council on uncertainty surrounding households’ inflation expectations. We conduct a randomized controlled trial using the Bundesbank Online Panel Households. Participants are provided with alternative information treatments concerning the vote in the Council, e.g. unanimity and dissent, and are asked to submit probabilistic inflation expectations. The results show that the vote is informative. Households revise their subjective inflation forecast after receiving information about the vote. Information about unanimity or dissent causes a wider individual distribution of future inflation for those households that were relatively certain before the treatment. For the remaining 60% of households, this information reduces uncertainty. Information about dissent increases uncertainty more than information about a unanimous vote, though the difference is not statistically significant. A unanimous vote unambiguously reduces inflation uncertainty for households with anchored inflation expectations.
Uncertainty about the War in Ukraine: Measurement and Effects on the German Economy
with Sinem Kandemir and Peter Tillmann, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 217 (2024) 493–506
Abstract: We assemble a data set of more than eight million German Twitter posts related to the war in Ukraine. Based on state-of-the-art methods of text analysis, we construct a daily index of uncertainty about the war as perceived by German Twitter. We then estimate a VAR model with daily financial and macroeconomic data and identify an exogenous uncertainty shock. The increase in uncertainty has strong effects on financial markets and causes a significant decline in economic activity as well as an increase in expected inflation. We find the effects of uncertainty to be particularly strong in the first months of the war.
Working Papers
Monetary Metanomics: The Effect of Monetary Policy on Virtual Real Estate Prices (2025)
with Salah Hassanin
Abstract: This paper examines the impact of monetary policy on virtual real estate prices within the Decentraland metaverse. Utilizing transaction data from various blockchain marketplaces and metadata from parcel sales, we construct a daily Decentraland Price Index (DPI) based on a hedonic price model. Using state-dependent local projections, we show how the effect of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy varies with levels of user activity. We find that in high user-activity states, a monetary policy shock of 25 basis points leads to an immediate 20% decrease in the DPI, with the effect peaking at 45% by the fourth day. Our results not only demonstrate the sensitivity of virtual real estate markets to changes in monetary policy but also highlight the economic parallels between virtual and physical real estate.
Geopolitics in the Boardroom: How German Managers Respond to the War in Ukraine (2024)
with Sinem Kandemir and Peter Tillmann
Abstract: We use unique daily data from the German Business Panel, a survey among German managers, to estimate the impact of uncertainty about the war in Ukraine on managerial plans and expectations. Each workday, the online survey invites a random set of firms to answer a standard set of questions. War-related uncertainty is extracted from a corpus of more than eight million German-language Twitter messages about the war in Ukraine. Higher uncertainty has strong adverse effects by prompting firms to plan higher prices and expect a drop in dividends, revenues, profits and investment. The persistent fall in expected R&D expenditure suggests that the shock has consequences for long-run productivity growth. Managers’ satisfaction with economic policy increases after an uncertainty shock. The sensitivity of managers with respect to war-related uncertainty depends on the overall level of geopolitical risk.
Work in Progress
A lot, including:
Prices at Prime Time: How TV News Shape Inflation Attention in Germany
with Brenton Bruns
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