In this paper our main aim is to quantify the role that housing collateral plays for the monetary transmission mechanism. Furthermore, we want to explore the implications of the increase in household indebtedness, and specifically the loan-to-value ratio, in the last two decades. We set up a two...

Die krisenhaften Entwicklungen seit dem Jahr 2008 haben es für die großen Zentralbanken notwendig gemacht, ihre Leitzinsen auf nahezu Null zu senken. Gleichzeitig bekunden die Zentralbanken, dass sie die Zinsen noch für eine ausgedehnte Zeit niedrig halten werden. In einem solchen Umfeld von...

I investigate the effect of wealth on consumption in a new dataset with financial and housing wealth from 16 countries. The baseline estimation method based on the sluggishness of consumption growth implies that the eventual (long-run) marginal propensity to consume out of total wealth is 5...

This paper presents a simple new method for measuring `wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the stickiness of consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption `habits') to distinguish between immediate and eventual wealth effects. In U.S. data, we...

Autonomous demand shock affects consumption spending. Variation in consumption spending contributes to the volatility in aggregate demand. As the investor is risk averse, volatility of aggregate demand reduces investment. Government injects monetary noise to reduce the volatility in aggregate...

Communication targeting households and firms has become a stand-alone policy tool of many central banks. But which forms of communication, if any, can reach ordinary people and manage their economic expectations effectively? In a large-scale randomized control trial, we show that communication...

How do changes in monetary policy affect consumption? Using household data for the US and the UK, we show that most of the aggregate response of consumption to interest rates is driven by households with a mortgage. Outright home owners do not adjust expenditure at all and renters change their...

We study optimal monetary policy during temporary supply contractions when aggregate demand has inertia and expansionary policy is constrained. In this environment, it is optimal to run the economy hot until supply recovers. Positive output gaps in the low-supply phase lessen the negative output...

Macroeconomic models typically assume additively separable preferences where consumption enters the utility function in a logarithmic form. This restriction implies that consumption growth is highly sensitive to movements in real interest rates, which in turn implies an unrealistically steep...

Macroeconomic models typically assume additively separable preferences where consumption enters the utility function in a logarithmic form. This restriction implies that consumption growth is highly sensitive to movements in real interest rates, which in turn implies an unrealistically steep...