I construct a novel measure of household uncertainty based on survey data for European countries. I show that household uncertainty shocks do not universally behave like negative demand shocks. Notably, household uncertainty shocks are largely inflationary in Europe. Further analysis, including...

In a survey of more than 600 economists, most respondents prefer their central bank to have an explicit inflation target. Roughly half want the central bank to keep its current target. Two thirds of the rest want to raise the target, with a median preferred change of one percentage point. In a...

I construct a novel measure of household uncertainty based on survey data for European countries. I show that household uncertainty shocks are not universally like negative demand shocks. Notably, household uncertainty shocks are largely inflationary in Europe. These results lend support to a...

I study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on business confidence in 11 Euro area countries and its consequent impact on economic activity. To obtain causal effects, I instrument business confidence with domestic household confidence as well as average household confidence in neighboring...

I document a statistical link between old-age dependency ratios and average markups. I propose that a mechanism whereby households develop deep habits in consumption as they age could explain this feature of the data. I show that when this mechanism is embedded in an overlapping generations New...

I propose a theory of information production and learning in credit markets in which the incentives to engage in activities that reveal information about aggregate fundamentals vary over the business cycle and may account for both the excessive optimism that fueled booms preceding financial...

We consider optimal capital requirements for banks' lending activities when the potential trade-off between financial stability and economic (productivity) growth is taken into account. Both sides of the trade-off are affected by banks' credit allocation, which in turn is affected by the risk...

This study provides estimates of the real effects of macro-uncertainty de- composed into fundamental and overconfidence bias components. Crucially, overconfidence biases lower ex-ante measures of uncertainty, while fundamen- tal uncertainty raises both ex-ante and ex-post measures. This...

I provide a measure of household uncertainty available for European Union (EU) countries. The measure draws from the same consumer survey data used to construct widely-used consumer sentiment indices. I find that increases in household uncertainty are followed by declines in consumer sentiment...

This paper seeks to understand dynamics of inflation and marginal cost (labor share) in models that account for the inclusion of productivity shocks in standard New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC). The question of interest is on the empirical importance of and whether productivity shocks shift...