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Working Paper
Firm Dynamics, Inflation, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy
I study how fluctuations in business formation and destruction affect inflation and the transmission of monetary policy. To do this analysis, I extend a New Keynesian model to include endogenous business formation and destruction and heterogeneous producers. A decline in the number of producers puts upward pressure on inflation, and I find that this mechanism can explain about half of the missing deflation following the Great Recession. I then study the transmission of monetary policy in this framework. I show that endogenous fluctuations in entry generate an intertemporal trade-off in ...
Working Paper
Entry, Variable Markups, and Business Cycles
The creation of new businesses declines in recessions. In this paper, I study the effects of pro-cyclical business formation on aggregate employment in a general equilibrium model of firm dynamics. The key features of the model are that the elasticity of demand faced by firms falls with their market share and that adjustment costs slow the reallocation of employment between firms. In response to a decline in entry, incumbent firms' market shares increase, their elasticity of demand falls, and they increase their markups and reduce employment. To quantify the model, I study the relationship ...
Working Paper
Household Consumption Does Not Respond Directly to Interest Rates: Evidence From 10 Macroeconomic Shocks
We estimate how much household spending responds directly to changes in interest rates. We develop a Bayesian procedure that uses the empirical impulse responses to macroeconomic shocks to discipline the consumer block of a HANK model. The procedure can be applied shock-by-shock or pooled jointly. We apply this method in two ways using 10 macroeconomic shocks: a structural model with sticky expectations over both income and interest rates, and a non-parametric estimation of the consumption-to-interest-rate Jacobian. We find no evidence that households respond directly to interest rates at any ...
Discussion Paper
Wealth Heterogeneity and Consumer Spending
Economists have become increasingly interested in the effects of household heterogeneity on macroeconomic dynamics. Changes in the distribution of income and wealth, coupled with advances in data and computation, have brought questions about how heterogeneity affects macroeconomic dynamics to the forefront of the discipline.
Discussion Paper
Debt Payments and Spending: Evidence from the 2023 Student Loan Payment Restart
In October 2023, roughly 40 million Americans faced a new monthly bill as federal student loan payments resumed after a three-year pandemic-induced pause. The restart of loan payments effectively reduced disposable income for borrowers, raising a critical question: How do debt payments affect household spending?
Discussion Paper
Winners and losers from recent asset price changes
Asset prices and interest rates have changed dramatically and unexpectedly over the last two years as the Federal Reserve has raised its policy rate to combat higher inflation. In this note, we clarify the redistributive effects of these asset price changes in terms of welfare, which contrast sharply with those of wealth. Figure 1 depicts changes in the paths of six macroeconomic aggregates in the February 2023 CBO projection relative to their paths in the July 2021 projection.