Study title

Monetary policy is generally regarded as a central element in the attempts of policy makers to attenuate business-cycle fluctuations. According to the New Keynesian paradigm, central banks are able to stimulate or depress aggregate demand in the short run by adjusting their nominal interest rate targets. The effects of interest rate changes on aggregate consumption, the largest component of aggregate demand, are well understood in the context of this paradigm, on which the canonical "workhorse'' model used in monetary policy analysis is grounded. A key feature of the model is that aggregate consumption is fully described by the amount of goods consumed by a representative household. A decline in the policy rate for instance implies that the real interest rate declines, the representative household saves less and hence increase its demand for consumption. At the same time, general equilibrium effects let labour income grow causing consumption to increase further. However, the mechanism outlined above ignores a considerable amount of empirically-observed heterogeneity among households. For example, households with a higher earnings elasticity to interest rate changes benefit more from a rate cut than those with a lower elasticity; households with large debt positions are at a relative advantage over households with large bond holdings; and households with low exposure to inflation are relatively better off than those holding a sizeable amount of nominal assets. As a result, the contribution to the aggregate consumption response differs substantially across households, implying that monetary expansions and tightenings produce relative "winners'' and relative "losers''. The aim of the project laid out in this proposal is to give a disaggregated account of the heterogeneous effects of monetary-policy induced interest rate changes on household consumption and a detailed analysis of the channels underlying them. Additionally, it seeks to draw conclusions about the...