Publicaties

We use survey evidence on reported spending in hypothetical energy price shock scenarios to study novel features of the price elasticity of energy demand and the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) after paying the energy bill. We document several nonlinearities depending on the sign and magnitude of the energy price shock that are economically relevant, including at the extensive and intensive margins. There is also considerable heterogeneity ...

New Keynesian DSGE models assume a constant degree of wage indexation to past inflation, neglecting empirical and institutional evidence of a time-varying degree. We build a DSGE model with utility-maximizing workers that can endogenously choose the wage indexation rule. We find that workers index their wage to past inflation when shocks to productivity and the nominal anchor drive output fluctuations. By contrast, they index wages to the ...

Exogenous shifts in international food commodity prices, which are identified using an SVAR model with global harvest shocks as an external instrument, explain almost 30% of euro-area inflation volatility over the medium term and contributed significantly to the twin puzzle of missing (dis)inflation in the era after the Great Recession. International food price shocks have an impact on food retail prices through the food production chain, but ...

Using a structural time-varying-parameter Bayesian vector autoregression (TVP-BVAR) framework, this paper documents that oil price increases caused by oil supply disruptions did not affect food commodity prices before the start of the millennium, but had positive spillover effects in more recent periods and particularly in the era around the Great Recession. Likewise, shortfalls in global food commodity supply resulting from bad harvests have ...

Extreme weather events are expected to increase with climate change. Such events are detrimental for local economic activity but could also affect countries that are not directly exposed through global agricultural production shortfalls and price surges. Here, estimations for 75 countries show that increases in global agricultural commodity prices caused by harvest or weather disruptions in other regions of the world significantly curtail ...

Studies that examine the impact of food prices on conflict usually assume that (all) changes in international food prices are exogenous shocks for individual countries or local areas. By isolating strictly exogenous shifts in global food commodity prices, we show that this assumption could seriously distort estimations of the impact on conflict in African regions. Specifically, we show that increases in food prices that are caused by harvest ...

We estimate a New Keynesian wage Phillips curve for a panel of 24 OECD countries and allow the degree of wage indexation to past inflation to vary according to structural characteristics. We find that the degree of wage indexation is significantly lower for countries with an inflation target. However, this effect vanishes when we control for the degree of goods market competition. By contrast, more goods market competition is consistently ...

We use novel quarterly data of U.S. states to examine the dynamics of relative spending multipliers in the decade surrounding the Great Recession. While multipliers were around 1 in expansions, they reached values above 4 when a state was in a recession. Also a high (low) degree of household indebtedness augmented (lowered) a state's multiplier by 0.5 in expansions and 2 in recessions. We further document modest positive spillover effects across ...

Kerninzichten - De toename van de overheidsschuld door de coronacrisis kan opgevangen worden zonder de belastingen te moeten verhogen of te besparen op overheidsuitgaven. - Een overheid die schokken op de arbeidsmarkt gericht buffert en werken voldoende aantrekkelijk houdt, kan de economische schade serieus beperken. - Tijdelijke en gerichte overheidsuitgaven kunnen in de huidige economische context zeer efficiënt zijn en de begroting zelfs meer ...