This thesis presents four essays that study the determinants of private household debt and the relation between private indebtedness and macroeconomic activity. Chapter 1 shows that inequality and household debt are cointegrated of order one and therefore share a common trending relation. In...

This paper studies the welfare effects of severalmonetary policy rules in the presence of anticipated and unanticipated oil price shocks. Our analysis is based on a stylized New Keynesian model of a small open economy. Our main findings are the following: i) Standard interest rate rules amplify...

This paper compares the welfare effects of anticipated and unanticipated cost-push shocks in the canonical New Keynesian model with optimal monetary policy. We find that, for empirically plausible degrees of nominal rigidity, the anticipation of a future cost-push shock leads to a higher welfare...

This paper analyzes the impacts of news shocks on macroeconomic volatility. Whereas anticipation amplifies volatility in any purely forward-looking model, such as the baseline New Keynesian model, the results are ambiguous when including a backward-looking component. In addition to these...