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’.

Inequality in the Consumer Credit Channel of Monetary Policy

with Leonardo Soriano de Alencar and Antonia Tsang

Using loan-level data from the Brazilian credit registry, this paper shows that the effect of monetary policy on consumer borrowing costs is unequal across the income distribution. The pass-through of monetary policy to consumer interest rates is stronger for lower-income borrowers than for higher earners. Moreover, this pass-through heterogeneity is asymmetric between periods of monetary loosening and tightening. While the pass-through of hikes during the post-Covid tightening cycle was stronger for lower-income borrowers, the pass-through of cuts to lower earners during the previous loosening cycle was weaker than for higher earners. These results are not explained by differences in personal characteristics such as age, race or gender, nor disparities in education or employment formality. Similarly, the results are not solely driven by differences in portfolio composition. Decomposing the observed pass-through heterogeneity, we find that monetary policy has unequal effects on borrowing costs even within loans of the same type, volume and maturity. We argue that the results are consistent with being driven by the response of loan supply to monetary policy, and show that pass-through heterogeneity is driven by the lending behaviour of large, privately-owned banks.

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.