Oil price shocks, business cycles and monetary policy Ghent University
The aim of the project is to study the optimal monetary policy response to oil price shocks.
The aim of the project is to study the optimal monetary policy response to oil price shocks.
In turbulent Covid-19 times, we experience shocks that have an immediate impact on the financial situation of economic actors. Tracking these changes with accounting data, monthly surveys or quarterly macro-economic data leads to numbers that are neither timely nor accurate: they are not detailed enough and published with a release lag. The solution is a digital platform called Belgian Economy Today. The platform aggregates, distributes and ...
The euro area as a currency union shares a monetary policy determined by the European Central Bank. Individual member states are therefore restricted in their response to economic shocks. For my dissertation, I am interested in considering the case of a country within the eurozone, as a small open economy, that is dependent on its monetary policy, but autonomous in its fiscal policy. Research points toward the importance of the interaction ...
This project provides theoretical, quantitative and empirical explanations on the effects of debt moratorium policies, which stipulates the suspension of payments during stress episodes, for households, businesses and the sovereign. The theory predicts an increase in loan rates for non-stressed agents and a decline in rates for stressed agents while loan amounts depend on demand and supply elasticities. To empirically corroborate these ...
The recent surge in energy prices has put ample pressure on wallets of economic agents. Principally households in the lower decile of the income distribution are experiencing cutbacks in consumption, since they spend a relatively larger fraction of their income on energy. Consequently, central banks are raising interest rates to tone down inflation, while fiscal governments seek to retain the purchasing power of households. The purpose of ...
Following a decade of low interest rates, firm leverage has increased substantially. This structural rise in firm leverage, aggravated by the COVID-19 crisis, threatens financial stability and might lead to another lost decade of low productivity. While household leverage has attracted extensive research after the Great Financial Crisis, firm leverage dynamics remain a blind spot of macroeconomics. Studies on the drivers of firm leverage fail ...
Firm leverage dynamics remain a blind spot of macroeconomics despite their impact on productivity and financial stability. This proposal investigates the role of banks’ sentiment in the structural rise in firm leverage in a corporate finance model with behavioural banks. It empirically tests the role of banks’ biases by offering a new way to measure banks’ optimism with artificial intelligence.
This project studies the impact of changes in food commodity prices on economic activity, inflation and the interaction with monetary policy.