Does global liquidity help to forecast US inflation?

We construct a measure of global liquidity using the growth rates of broad money for the G7 economies. Global liquidity produces forecasts of US inflation that are significantly more accurate than the forecasts based on US money growth, Phillips curve, autoregressive and moving average models. The marginal predictive power of global liquidity is strong at three years horizons. Results are robust to alternative measures of inflation.

Consumer Spending and Fiscal Consolidation: Evidence from a Housing Tax Experiment

A major change of the property tax system in 2011 generated significant variation in the amount of housing taxes paid by Italian households. Using new questions added to the Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW), we exploit this variation to provide an unprecedented analysis of the effects of property taxes on consumer spending. A tax on the main dwelling leads to large expenditure cuts among households with mortgage debt and low liquid wealth but generates only small revenues for the government. In contrast, higher tax rates on other residential properties reduce private savings and yield large tax revenues

Regional Transfer Multipliers

A series of discontinuities in the allocation mechanism of federal transfers, to municipal governments in Brazil allow us to identify the causal effect of public spending on local labor markets, using a ‘fuzzy’ Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD). Our estimates imply a cost per job of about 8,000 US dollars per year and a local income multiplier around two. The effect comes mostly from employment in services and is more pronounced among less financially developed municipalities

The consumption response to positive and negative income shocks

A set of newly added questions in the 2011 to 2014 Bank of England/NMG Consulting Survey reveals that British households tend to change their consumption by significantly more in reaction to temporary and unanticipated falls in income than to rises of the same size. Household balance sheet characteristics such as high debt-to-income ratios and small liquidity buffers, concerns about credit market access and higher subjective risk of lower future income account for a sizable share of this spending asymmetry. Our findings have important implications for predicting the response of aggregate consumption to expansionary and contractionary macroeconomic policies

Does global liquidity help to forecast US inflation?

We construct a measure of global liquidity using the growth rates of broad money for the G7 economies. Global liquidity produces forecasts of US inflation that are significantly more accurate than the forecasts based on US money growth, Phillips curve, autoregressive and moving average models. The marginal predictive power of global liquidity is strong at three years horizons. Results are robust to alternative measures of inflation