Project

INVESTIGATING THE HETEROGENEOUS RESPONSES OF HOUSEHOLDS AND FIRMS TO MACROECONOMIC SHOCKS

Code
11D2123N
Duration
01 November 2022 → 17 December 2023
Funding
Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Research disciplines
  • Social sciences
    • Consumption, saving, production, investment, labour markets and informal economy
    • Macroeconomics and monetary economics not elsewhere classified
Keywords
Empirical macroeconomics Household heterogeneity Firm behavior and expectations
 
Project description

Up to the outbreak of the Global Financial Crisis, standard macroeconomic theory relied on the so-called representative agent New Keynesian (RANK) models. When the crisis hit, highlighting the weakness of such an approach, macroeconomist understood that the rational expectations hypothesis had failed and that the propagation mechanism of macroeconomic shocks cannot be studied without taking into account agent heterogeneity. This led to the development of heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) models. The purpose of this project is to improve the understanding of such models, analyzing empirically some of their implications. First, I will exploit a unique micro-dataset to analyze the heterogeneity of agents’ Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) in response to nominal wage shocks. Second, still relying on the same dataset, I will explore the income and consumption heterogeneous responses to economic-wide shocks (in particular, energy and food commodity price shocks). Finally, I will focus on the other fundamental actor of theoretical models, firms, to analyze through a randomized controlled trial (RCT) how their economic decisions are heterogeneously impacted by information shocks.