We document that inflation risk in the U.S. varies significantly over time and is often asymmetric. To analyze the macroeconomic effects of these asymmetric risks within a tractable framework, we construct the beliefs representation of a general equilibrium model with skewed distribution of markup shocks. Optimal policy requires shifting agents’ expectations counter to the direction of inflation risks.
Climate change is a global-scale structural change, affecting economies across the world, alongside global fragmentation, digitalisation and demographics. This paper analyses the diffusion of climate policies and technologies and the role of institutions and governance in that process. It discusses theory, models and data available to date, and the empirical evidence for the 20 European Union and all 40 countries covered by the OECD’s Environmental Policy Stringency index.
Institutional investors, such as investment funds, are playing an increasingly important role in residential real estate markets. This raises the possibility that their actions might drive aggregate market outcomes and may change how and which macrofinancial shocks transmit to house prices. In a Bayesian vector autoregression setting, we show that a demand shock from institutional investors has a positive and persistent effect on aggregate euro area house price growth and mortgage lending volumes.
Using supervisory data of alternative investment funds investing in bonds, I exploit the COVID-19 crisis to examine the effectiveness of redemption restrictions from a financial stability perspective. First, I find that redemption restrictions reduced outflows during the March 2020 market turmoil but did not result in higher outflows in the periods following the crisis episode. Second, I find that funds with higher redemption restrictions engaged less in procyclical cash hoarding during the COVID-19 crisis period, even after controlling for the size of their outflows.
We study the heterogeneous pass-through of monetary policy across firms with different labor shares. The goal is to obtain evidence on a labor-intensity transmission channel that should in fact be operating for other kinds of demand shocks as well. Our basic idea is that labor is special: unlike capital, it cannot be pledged against loans as collateral due to property rights.
Following the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain set up public Asset Management Companies (AMCs), purchasing delinquent loans equal to 44%, 16%, and 10% of GDP, respectively. Though deemed successful, it’s unclear if this was de facto traditional capital and liquidity support. We show that AMCs have a systematic advantage in reducing pecuniary externalities and costs associated with loan delinquencies.
Homeownership rates and holdings of housing wealth differ immensely across countries. Using micro data from five economies, we estimate a life-cycle model with illiquid housing in which households face a discrete–continuous choice between renting and owning a house. We use the model to decompose the cross-country differences in the homeownership rate and the value of housing wealth into three groups of explanatory factors: house price expectations, the institutional set-up of the housing market and preferences. We find that all three groups of factors matter, although preferences less so.
The digitalisation of payments has accelerated over the last decades with the internet and ever faster and cheaper computing. Now, many believe that decentralised finance (“DeFi”) offers fundamentally new possibilities for trading, payments and settlement. Moreover, for a few years central banks have launched work on what has been called retail and wholesale central bank digital currencies (“CBDC”). Concurrent to the rise of innovative technologies has been the advent of new terminology, which is widely used, but which often seems to be biased, confusing, or is used inconsistently.
An increase of e100 per tonne in the EU carbon price reduces the carbon footprint but lowers GDP due to higher energy costs and carbon leakage. Using a dynamic multi-sector, multi-country model augmented with an energy block that includes endogenous renewable energy investment, we analyze the macroeconomic and emissions effects of a carbon price. Investment in renewable energy mitigates electricity price increases in the medium term, leading to a smaller GDP loss (up to -0.4%) and a larger emissions reduction (24%) in the EU.
This paper investigates the role of banking networks in the transmission of shocks across borders. Combining banking deregulation in the US with state-level idiosyncratic demand shocks, we show that geographically diversified banks reallocate funds from economies experiencing negative shocks to unaffected regions. Our findings indicate that in the presence of idiosyncratic shocks, financial integration reduces business cycle comovement and synchronizes consumption patterns.
