Financial institutions

Elizabeth Llanes, Jeffrey Thompson, and Alice Henriques VolzThe question of whether affluent households save at a higher rate than other parts of the distribution has been asked by economists on numerous occasions since the 1950s. It is standard in this research to define affluent, or “rich,” households as those with high lifetime earnings or income to better ground the empirical question in relevant theory.

The Bank's Court of Directors acts as a unitary board, setting the organisation's strategy and budget and taking key decisions on resourcing and appointments. Required to meet a minimum seven times per year, it has five executive members from the Bank and up to nine non-executive members.

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy announcements on household expectations. We document announcements of price-related expansionary fiscal measures in response to the cost-of-living crisis in the four largest euro area economies and exploit the exogenous timing of fiscal actions relative to household survey participation to estimate their causal effects. Following fiscal announcements, households revise their beliefs: inflation perceptions rise, and unemployment perceptions fall.

Neil Mehrotra, Hyunseung Oh, and Julio L. OrtizUsing industry-level panel data and plausibly exogenous variation in supply conditions, we estimate the elasticity of retail price margins with respect to inventories along the retailer's optimal pricing curve. We find that this elasticity is negative and statistically significant, implying that lower finished-good inventories lead to higher price margins.