Search Results
Which Households Prefer ARMs vs. Fixed-Rate Mortgages?
Adjustable-rate mortgages appear to be more popular with younger, higher-income households that also have bigger mortgages, according to 2019 data.
Journal Article
Treasury Debt and Inflation Tax
We calculate the implicit inflation tax borne by households due to their holdings of U.S. Treasury debt. Nominal assets lose value due to unexpected inflation. We calculate unexpected changes in current and future inflation and document households’ holdings of Treasury debt across the wealth distribution, accounting for direct and indirect holdings through financial intermediaries. Combining these two pieces of information, we calculate the implied inflation tax across household wealth groups over the past four decades.
How Much Can Households Gain and Lose with Unexpected Inflation?
This analysis looks at how the 2021-22 inflation shock affected households based on their exposure to nominal assets and nominal liabilities.
Which U.S. Households Have Credit Card Debt?
Households carrying credit card balances tend to be middle income, but the ratio of credit card debt to income is highest among those who earn the least.
Which Households Are Most Exposed to the Inflation “Tax”?
The federal government benefits from unexpected bouts of inflation since the real value of its debt falls. However, this also hurts its debtholders.
Why Are Illiquid Households Affected More by Inflation?
Surprise inflation can hit illiquid households harder because they can’t easily offset real losses in short-term assets with real gains in long-term liabilities.
Working Paper
Optimal Asset Market Operations
We characterize governments' optimal responses to asset market disturbances across a broad class of models with financial frictions. We show that the Ramsey plan can be achieved by a policy rule targeting a specific relationship between asset returns, regardless of the underlying disturbances. This relationship is determined by asset supply and demand elasticities that can be estimated empirically with standard identification strategies. Absent financial frictions, the optimal policy stabilizes spreads across all assets. However, in the presence of financial frictions, the optimal rule ...
Working Paper
Nominal Maturity Mismatch and the Liquidity Cost of Inflation
We document a liquidity channel through which unexpected inflation generates substantial welfare losses. Household balance sheets are nominal maturity mismatched: nominal liabilities have a longer duration than nominal assets. Due to this mismatch, losses from unexpected inflation are concentrated over short time horizons, while gains are spread out over the longer run. This has negative effects on liquidity-constrained households, who cannot easily borrow against their future gains. We quantify the importance of the liquidity channel and show that, for households in the lower half of the ...
Working Paper
Financial Intermediation and Aggregate Demand: A Sufficient Statistics Approach
We provide a unified framework to study how the financial sector affects the transmission of macroeconomic policies, such as monetary and fiscal policies, and asset purchase programs. Our framework nests models of financial intermediation with various microfoundations and allows for rich household heterogeneity. The financial sector supplies liquidity by issuing liquid assets to finance illiquid capital. The elasticities of liquidity supply with respect to returns are sufficient statistics that summarize how the financial sector determines responses to policy through asset markets. This asset ...
Working Paper
Asset supply and liquidity transformation in HANK
We study how the financial sector affects fiscal and monetary policy in heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) economies. We show that, in a large class of models of financial intermediation, relevant features of the financial sector are summarized by the elasticities of a liquid asset supply function. The financial sector in these models affects aggregate responses only through its ability to perform liquidity transformation (i.e., issue liquid assets to finance illiquid capital). If liquid asset supply responds inelastically to returns on capital (low cross-price elasticities), ...