Research
Working Papers
Household Liquidity Policy (Job Market Paper), with Patrick Moran
We assess ‘household liquidity policy’, a novel approach to stimulating aggregate demand that relies on relaxed regulation instead of conventional fiscal tools. We analyse the effectiveness of these liquidity policies, focusing on a form that was widely used during the Covid-19 pandemic: early access to retirement savings accounts. In a heterogeneous agent model with retirement and present–biased households we find both liquidity and conventional fiscal policies can achieve similar boosts to aggregate consumption but have different distributional implications. Relative to fiscal policy, liquidity policy benefits wealthier workers, retirees, and future generations, due to its lower tax burden and added flexibility, but it is also highly regressive. Liquidity policy shifts the future financial burden of present–day stimulus onto poorer and more present–biased workers, who only feel the impact when it is too late to adjust.
Situational and Behavioral Determinants of Early Withdrawal from Retirement Accounts, with Patrick Moran
Using a survey-elicited measure of psychological self-control and a policy change in Australia during Covid-19, we find that self-control issues significantly predict early withdrawals from retirement accounts. Individuals in the top quintile of self-control issues are 60\% more likely to withdraw than those in the bottom quintile. Self-control is a stronger predictor of early withdrawal than other behavioral factors such as financial literacy, planning horizons, or personality traits. The effects are economically meaningful: eliminating self-control issues could reduce early withdrawals by 24% - as large as the effect of adverse income shocks on withdrawals during Covid-19.
Work in Progress
The Nested-Drift Algorithm, with Soroush Sabet
Yield to Temptation: A Comparison of Present-Biased Preferences in Continuous Time
Publications & Policy work
Disunited Kingdom? Brexit, Trade and Scottish Independence, with Hanwei Huang and Thomas Sampson
CEP Brexit Analysis No. 17 (2021) [LSE blog] [VOX EU blog]
Market Power and Monetary Policy, with Tommaso Aquilante, Shiv Chowla, Nikola Dacic, Andrew Haldane, Riccardo Masolo, Martin Seneca, and Srdan Tatomir
Bank of England Working Paper No. 798 (2019) [Speech]Decomposing Differences in Productivity Distributions
Bank of England Working Paper No. 740 (2018) [BU blog]
Organizational Cultures of Corruption, with Gautam Bose
Journal of Public Economic Theory (2017) 19:1