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...

Binding lower bounds on interest rates and large government deficits limit the scope of fiscal and monetary policies to stimulate households' spending through financial intermediaries and firms. Policymakers have thus been implementing unconventional policies that aim to increase households'...

We construct a simple exchange economy overlapping generations model in which there are along with a public social security various private insurance schemes to explore fertility and the effects of various variables on it. In the private system parents can invest in children and benefit from...

They do. Partly. We identify credit supply shocks via sign restrictions in a Bayesian VAR and separate them into positive and negative. Using local projections, we find that positive credit supply shocks leave notably different prints in private debt, mortgage debt, and debt: GDP, as opposed to...

We study the response of daily household spending to the unexpected component of the COVID-19 pandemic, which we label as pandemic shock. Based on daily forecasts of the number of fatalities, we construct the surprise component as the difference between the actual and the expected number of...

We examine the dynamic effects of housing demand shocks on a large set of U.S. macroeconomic series and detailed household balance sheet components for four wealth percentile groups. The results show that a positive housing shock translates into a large and persistent boom of economic activity,...

We provide evidence that expansionary fiscal policy lowers return differences between public debt and less liquid assets-the liquidity premium. We rationalize this finding in an estimated heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian model with incomplete markets and portfolio choice, in which public debt...

Die derzeitige Konjunkturkrise ist am aktuellen Rand eine Konsumkrise und in ihrer Dimension deutlich stärker als während der globalen Finanzmarktverwerfungen von 2008/2009. Der private Konsum hat sich in den 15 Jahren bis zum Ausbruch der Corona-Pandemie in Deutschland ähnlich gut entwickelt...

In the Covid-19 crisis, most OECD countries use short-time work schemes (subsidized working time reductions) to preserve employment relationships. This paper studies whether short-time work can save jobs through stabilizing aggregate demand in recessions. We build a New Keynesian model with...

We build a stylized dynamic general equilibrium model with financial frictions to analyze costs and benefits of capital requirements in the short-term and long-term. We show that since increasing capital requirements limits the aggregate loan supply, the equilibrium loan rate spread increases,...