Projects

Macroeconomics and energy (exact subject to be defined)

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 ...

This research aims to explore how the presence of and progress in automation technology can radically alter the macroeconomic environment of developed countries and, in particular, how public policy can best react to this. Rapid technical progress in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics and computing often evokes the fear of impoverishment and widespread job losses, but it might also provide powerful tools to tackle 21st-century ...

This research aims to explore how progress in automation technologies can radically alter the macroeconomic environment of developed countries and how public policy can best react. My approach consists of constructing, calibrating and simulating computable overlapping generations models with inequality. In this general equilibrium setting, I examine the scope for policy to improve upon a laissez faire scenario of automation.

Firm leverage dynamics remain a blind spot of macroeconomics despite their impact on productivity and financial stability. This proposal investigates the role of banksU+2019 sentiment in the structural rise in firm leverage in a corporate finance model with behavioural banks. It empirically tests the role of banksU+2019 biases by offering a new way to measure banksU+2019 optimism with artificial intelligence.

Analysis of the effects of US fiscal integration on attenuating business cycles using county-level microdata.

Tenure track appointment in Empirical macroeconomics (Selien De Schryder)

Accurately estimating the state of the labor market lies at the core of successful macroeconomic policy. This project aims to improve the current

measurement practice by (i) using more appropriate labor market indicators than the standard unemployment rate, (ii) allowing for time-varying coefficients in the relationship of labor market indicators with other macroeconomic variables and (iii) exploiting the panel structure of the ...

We develop a model to study the determinants of time-variation in macroeconomic dynamics.

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 ...