Central banks

Households' income heterogeneity is important to explain consumption dynamics in response to aggregate macro uncertainty: an increase in uncertainty generates a consumption drop that is stronger for income poorer households. At the same time, labor markets are strongly responsive to macro uncertainty as the unemployment rate and the job separation rate rise, while the job finding rate falls. A heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions in the labor market can account for these empirical findings.

Combining euro-area credit register and carbon emission data, we provide evidence of a climate risk-taking channel in banks’ lending policies. Banks charge higher interest rates to firms featuring greater carbon emissions, and lower rates to firms committing to lower emissions, controlling for their probability of default. Both effects are larger for banks committed to decarbonization.

This paper uses a Bayesian Structural Vector Autoregressive (BSVAR) framework to estimate the pass-through of unexpected gas price supply shocks on HICP inflation in the euro area and its four largest economies. In comparison to oil price shocks, gas price shocks have approximately one-third smaller pass-through to headline inflation. Country-specific results indicate gas price increases matter more for German, Spanish and Italian inflation than for French inflation, hinging on the reliance on energy commodities in consumption, production, and different electricity prices regulation.

Michael B. Gordy and Alexander J. McNeilIn the spectral backtesting framework of Gordy and McNeil (2020) a probability measure on the unit interval is used to weight the quantiles of greatest interest in the validation of forecast models using probability-integral transform (PIT) data. We extend this framework to allow general Lebesgue-Stieltjes kernel measures with unbounded distribution functions, which brings powerful new tests based on truncated location-scale families into the spectral class.