The Unassuming Economist

From a new VOX post:

“Monetary policy shocks can affect different types of agents differently. These distributional effects can have important consequences for policy effectiveness. Using US data, this column explores how shocks differentially affect the prices faced by households with different incomes. The results suggest that middle-income households’ consumption baskets have more volatile prices than those of high-income households, and they are therefore more exposed to monetary policy shocks.”

“[…] Figure 3 plots the impulse responses for selected income percentile-specific CPIs. The monetary policy shock is a 25 basis-point increase in the Federal Funds rate on impact, thus a contraction. The consumption price indices of the high-income households react substantially less to monetary policy shocks than those for the middle of the income distribution. The difference is economically meaningful. After 12 months, the top 1% households’ CPI responds by 34% less, and the 96-99th percentile households by 22% less, than the CPI of the households in the middle of the income distribution (40th-60th percentiles). After 24 months, the differences are still 12% and 6%, respectively.”