I am a PhD student in Economics at the University of Cambridge, where my supervisor is Professor Florin Bilbiie.
For the 2025/26 academic year, I am visiting Princeton University as a Jane Eliza Procter Fellow.
My research focusses on the transmission of monetary and fiscal policy in economies with heterogeneous households. Download a copy of my CV here.
Working Papers
Government Debt and the Fiscal Channels of Monetary Policy in HANK Models
This paper uses a tractable HANK model to show how the design of fiscal policy and the characteristics of government debt can drive significant differences in monetary transmission within and across countries with different fiscal contexts, and across models with different fiscal specifications. The analytical results show that the fiscal channels can be expressed as the sum of a debt service channel, a debt composition channel, and a fiscal cyclicality channel. The magnitudes and directions of these channels are determined by the interactions between the size and composition of government debt, the choice of fiscal rule, the progressivity of the marginal fiscal instrument, and the distribution of government debt ownership. For a given fiscal block used in a theoretical model, or for any fiscal context observed in the data, the flexible model can be used to show when and how the fiscal channels affect monetary transmission.
Draft available soon!
Supersedes ‘Long-Term Government Debt and Monetary Policy in HANK Models’.
Heterogeneous Monetary Policy Pass-Through to Consumer Credit Along the Income Distribution
with Leonardo Soriano de Alencar and Antonia Tsang
Using loan-level data from the Brazilian credit registry, this paper investigates whether the pass-through of monetary policy to consumer credit is heterogeneous along the income distribution. We find three novel results on how monetary policy affects different consumers’ credit costs. Firstly, the pass-through of monetary policy to consumer interest rates is stronger for lower-income borrowers than for higher earners. Secondly, we decompose the results into a direct heterogeneity effect and portfolio composition channels. We show that the direct heterogeneity channel is operational, implying that pass-through of monetary policy would still be higher to lower-income individuals even if all borrowers had identical loan portfolios. Thirdly, we show that this pass-through heterogeneity is asymmetric between periods of monetary loosening and tightening. During the post-Covid tightening cycle, the pass-through of monetary policy hikes to consumers’ borrowing costs was stronger for individuals with lower incomes. Conversely, during the previous loosening cycle, the pass-through of cuts to lower earners was weaker than for higher earners. These results could therefore shed light on a new channel whereby monetary policy exacerbates inequality through consumers’ borrowing costs.
Draft available soon!
Complementarity, Heterogeneity, and Multipliers: Utility for HANK
with Florin Bilbiie and Fergal Hanks
Complementarity (between consumption and work) is essential for heterogeneous agent models’ ability to generate realistic “multiplier” effects for aggregate demand shocks, while at the same time avoiding puzzling predictions. We show how parameterizing complementarity—in the spirit of Frisch’s “utility acceleration”—separately from income effects is needed to achieve this. HANK models with complementarity can then deliver realistic fiscal multipliers while at the same time resolving both a “trilemma” (matching MPEs and MPCs) and a catch-22 “dilemma” (simultaneously resolving the forward guidance puzzle) emphasized in the literature. We prove this analytically in a tractable HANK model and illustrate it in a calibrated quantitative HANK model. Yet existing utility functions restrict either complementarity, or income effects—or both—and artificially imply that multipliers are exclusively a function of either. We propose two parametric functional forms where complementarity and the income effect are arbitrary and can be calibrated separately: a quasi-separable “GHHCRRA” utility and a “CCRRA” (constant complementarity and RRA) function.
Working paper available as CEPR DP 20804.
