Monetary Policy According to HANK
American Economic Review
vol. 108,
no. 3, March 2018
(pp. 697-743)
Abstract
We revisit the transmission mechanism from monetary policy to household consumption in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model. The model yields empirically realistic distributions of wealth and marginal propensities to consume because of two features: uninsurable income shocks and multiple assets with different degrees of liquidity and different returns. In this environment, the indirect effects of an unexpected cut in interest rates, which operate through a general equilibrium increase in labor demand, far outweigh direct effects such as intertemporal substitution. This finding is in stark contrast to small- and medium-scale Representative Agent New Keynesian (RANK) economies, where the substitution channel drives virtually all of the transmission from interest rates to consumption. Failure of Ricardian equivalence implies that, in HANK models, the fiscal reaction to the monetary expansion is a key determinant of the overall size of the macroeconomic response.Citation
Kaplan, Greg, Benjamin Moll, and Giovanni L. Violante. 2018. "Monetary Policy According to HANK." American Economic Review, 108 (3): 697-743. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20160042Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D31 Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
- E12 General Aggregative Models: Keynes; Keynesian; Post-Keynesian
- E21 Macroeconomics: Consumption; Saving; Wealth
- E24 Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
- E43 Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects
- E52 Monetary Policy
- E62 Fiscal Policy