Financial institutions

Public debt, iMPCs & fiscal policy transmission

09/03/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

This paper investigates the relationship between public debt and the effectiveness of fiscal policy, presenting evidence of an inverse relationship between government debt and fiscal multipliers. To explain the results, I develop and calibrate a HANK model tailored to the U.S. economy. The model reveals that higher public debt diminishes fiscal multipliers by making households less constrained. Theoretically, I show intertemporal marginal propensities to consume (iMPCs) are sufficient statistics of public debt, influencing fiscal multipliers.

Nonlinearities and heterogeneity in firms response to aggregate fluctuations: what can we learn from machine learning?

09/03/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Firms respond heterogeneously to aggregate fluctuations, yet standard linear models impose restrictive assumptions on firm sensitivities. Applying the Generalized Random Forest to U.S. firm-level data, we document strong nonlinearities in how firm characteristics shape responses to macroeconomic shocks. We show that nonlinearities significantly lower aggregate esponses, leading linear models to overestimate the economy’s sensitivity to shocks by up to 1.7 percentage points.

IFDP Paper: Geopolitical Risk and Global Banking

08/27/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Friederike Niepmann and Leslie Sheng ShenHow do banks respond to geopolitical risk, and is this response distinct from other macroeconomic risks? Using U.S. supervisory data and new geopolitical risk indices, we show that banks reduce cross-border lending to countries with elevated geopolitical risk but continue lending to those markets through foreign affiliates—unlike their response to other macro risks.

FEDS Paper: When Tails Are Heavy: The Benefits of Variance-Targeted, Non-Gaussian, Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimation of GARCH Models

08/27/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Todd PronoIn heavy-tailed cases, variance targeting the Student's-t estimator proposed in Bollerslev (1987) for the linear GARCH model is shown to be robust to density misspecification, just like the popular Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimator (QMLE). The resulting Variance-Targeted, Non-Gaussian, Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimator (VTNGQMLE) is shown to possess a stable limit, albeit one that is highly non-Gaussian, with an ill-defined variance.

Opening the black box of local projections

08/27/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Local projections (LPs) are widely used in empirical macroeconomics to estimate impulse responses to policy interventions. Yet, in many ways, they are black boxes. It is often unclear what mechanism or historical episodes drive a particular estimate. We introduce a new decomposition of LP estimates into the sum of contributions of historical events, which is the product, for each time stamp, of a weight and the realization of the response variable. In the least squares case, we show that these weights admit two interpretations. First, they represent purified and standardized shocks.

Geography versus income: the heterogeneous effects of carbon taxation

08/27/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

The distributive effects of carbon taxation are critical for its political acceptability and depend on both income and geographic factors. Using French administrative data, household surveys, and matched employer-employee records, we document that rural households spend 2.8 times more on fossil fuels than urban households and are employed in firms that emit 2.7 times more greenhouse gases. We incorporate these insights into a spatial heterogeneous-agent model with endogenous migration and wealth accumulation, linking spatial and macroeconomic approaches.

Geography versus income: the heterogeneous effects of carbon taxation

08/27/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

The distributive effects of carbon taxation are critical for its political acceptability and depend on both income and geographic factors. Using French administrative data, household surveys, and matched employer-employee records, we document that rural households spend 2.8 times more on fossil fuels than urban households and are employed in firms that emit 2.7 times more greenhouse gases. We incorporate these insights into a spatial heterogeneous-agent model with endogenous migration and wealth accumulation, linking spatial and macroeconomic approaches.

Central bank communication with non-experts: insights from a randomized field experiment

08/26/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

We would like to thank Philipp Lane, Klaus Adam, Michael Ehrmann, Christophe Kamps, Timo Reinelt, Annalisa Ferrando, Philippine Cour-Thimann, Felix Hammermann, Davide Romelli, Andreas Kapounek, and colleagues from DG Communication for for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper. This paper was presented at the 2025 AEA Conference in San Francisco, and we appreciate the feedback and suggestions received from the participants.

Pages

Subscribe to Financial institutions