Eun-sung Ma

Abstract Government spending shocks have substantially different effects on consumers across the income distribution: consumption increases for the poor whereas it decreases for the rich in response to a rise in government expenditure. I shed light on this issue by incorporating a progressive tax scheme and productive public expenditure into a heterogeneous agent model economy with indivisible labor. The model economy is able to successfully match aggregate and disaggregate effects of government

Abstract We document the evolution of homeownership rate across various age groups for the period 1995–2015. We find that variations in the homeownership rates are relatively large for the young, which is mostly driven by renter‐to‐owner transitions. In order to explain these empirical facts, we consider a life‐cycle model featuring housing tenure decisions. Housing is modeled as an indivisible and lumpy investment subject to both loan‐to‐value (LTV) and debt‐to‐income (DTI) credit constraints a

Abstract This article studies a labor‐supply‐side channel affecting the relationship between monetary policy and income inequality. To this end, I build a heterogeneous‐agent New Keynesian economy with indivisible labor in which both macro and micro labor supply elasticities are endogenously generated. First, I find that monetary policy shocks have distributional consequences due to a substantial heterogeneity in labor supply elasticity across households. Second, a more equal economy is associat

Abstract In the United States, the income share of the top 5% income group is acyclical over the business cycle. This study attempts to explain the cyclical behavior of the income distribution over the business cycle, particularly focusing on the top 5% income earners' share, using a heterogeneous agent model featuring a choice to become an entrepreneur. The model economy successfully reproduces the acyclical behavior of the income share of the top 5%. During expansions, relatively more people b

Abstract This paper studies how adjustment along intensive and extensive margins of labor supply affects aggregate and disaggregate effects of monetary policy. To this end, I develop a heterogeneous‐agent New Keynesian (HANK) economy where a nonlinear mapping from hours worked into labor services generates operative adjustment along intensive and extensive margins of labor supply. I find that monetary policy has significantly different effects on earnings inequality, depending on the extent to w

Abstract This study investigates whether the Federal Reserve (Fed) should care about inequality. We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model, which generates empirically realistic inequalities and business cycle properties observed in the U.S. data. We consider the income Gini coefficient in a monetary policy rule to see how an inequality-targeting monetary policy affects aggregate and disaggregate outcomes, as well as economic welfare. We find that a monetary policy rule with an

This paper investigates the quantitative implications of real wage rigidities and heterogeneity for two long-lasting puzzles in the business cycle literature: the low correlation between total hours worked and labor productivity and the large volatility of the labor wedge, defined as a gap between the marginal rate of substitution of aggregate leisure for aggregate consumption and the marginal product of aggregate labor. I shed light on these issues by extending a heterogeneous-agent model with

Abstract This paper investigates whether interconnectivity among local housing markets influences the effectiveness of the (United States) U.S. monetary transmission mechanism. We construct measures of housing market connectedness and employ a state‐dependent local projection method to estimate nonlinear impulse responses of macroeconomic variables to monetary policy (MP) shocks. The findings show that MP has a greater impact when regional housing markets are more synchronized. Higher interconne

Business cycles affect income shares of low- and high-income groups in the U.S. economy. Income shares of the bottom three income quintiles are procyclical; while those of the other quintiles are countercyclical. However, the very top five percent income group is unaffected by the business cycle. This study attempts to explain the cyclical behavior of the income distribution over the business cycle, focusing on the top five percent income earners' share, by incorporating an entrepreneurial choic