I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Cowles Foundation for the academic years 2025-2027.
I study how firms set prices dynamically, the effects of heterogeneity, incomplete information, and real rigidities on firms’ decisions, and the positive and normative implications of monetary policy.
I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the New York University in 2025.
Research Fields: Macroeconomics, Monetary, Information, Search
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Publications
Anatomy of the Phillips Curve: Micro Evidence and Macro Implications, with M. Gertler, S. Lenzu, J. Tielens
American Economic Review, vol. 115, no. 11 (Nov 2025)
We develop a bottom-up approach to estimating the slope of the primitive form of the New Keynesian Phillips curve, which features marginal cost as the relevant real activity variable. Using quarterly micro data on prices, costs, and output from the Belgian manufacturing sector, we estimate dynamic pass-through regressions that identify the degrees of nominal and real rigidities in price setting. Our estimates imply a high slope for the marginal cost-based Phillips curve, which contrasts with the low estimates of the conventional unemployment or output-based formulations in the literature. We reconcile the difference by demonstrating that, although the pass-through of marginal cost into inflation is substantial, the elasticity of marginal cost with respect to the output gap is low, at least for pre-pandemic data. We also illustrate the advantage of a marginal cost-based Phillips curve for characterizing the transmission of supply shocks to inflation.
Oil Prices, Monetary Policy and Inflation Surges, with M. Gertler
Conditionally accepted, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
We develop a simple quantitative New Keynesian model aimed at analyzing how the reaction of monetary policy contributed to the recent rise and fall in inflation. The model includes several shocks but features oil price shocks for two reasons: (i) energy prices have been among the central factors in discussions about the surge; (ii) we can use identified oil shocks along with monetary shocks to estimate and discipline the model. We then employ the estimated framework to recover shocks without targeting inflation. Overall the model accounts for roughly three fourths of the surge in PCE inflation. Both the oil shocks and the shocks to policy accommodation played important roles in the inflation rise. Moreover, the easing of oil prices and subsequent shift to policy tightening contributed to the decline. A nonmonetary demand shock (a composite of private demand and fiscal stimulus) also contributed to inflation starting in 2022.
Working Papers
(NEW DRAFT) Dynamic Pricing under Information Frictions: Evidence from Firm-level Subjective Expectations, with J. Tielens
This paper develops and implements a structural method to quantify how forward-looking firms are and estimate their effective discount factor from the dynamic pass-through of production-cost shocks into prices. We propose a model featuring real, nominal, and information frictions, and demonstrate how incomplete information distorts the pricing behavior to appear as if firms were myopic, anchoring current prices to past decisions, and underreacting to idiosyncratic cost shocks. Using a unique monthly micro-dataset for the Belgian manufacturing sector that links firm-level prices and costs to survey-based expectations, we find a significant contemporaneous pass-through but a muted response to expected future cost growth. The implied monthly discount factor is about 0.8. These results are consistent with an essentially static pricing behavior, with firms responding strongly as cost shocks materialize. Our micro-estimates imply an “hybrid” Phillips curve with high aggregate discounting and persistence, which can explain the hump-shaped response of inflation to shocks and its long and variable lags.
Micro and Macro Cost-price Dynamics in Normal Times and Inflation Surges, with M. Gertler, S. Lenzu, J. Tielens
We develop a unified approach to studying cost-price dynamics in the cross-section of firms in order to explain the time series of aggregate inflation, both during normal times and inflation surges. A key novelty is the use of microdata on firms’ prices and production costs to construct an empirical measure of price gaps—the deviation between a firm’s listed and optimal price. We characterize the mapping between price gaps and the size and frequency of price adjustments and take them to the data to test nonparametrically how firms’ pricing strategies align with the predictions of different pricing models, conditional on shocks of different magnitudes. The microdata provide strong evidence of state dependence: the passthrough of costs into inflation increases more than proportionately when the economy is hit by large aggregate shocks. In contrast, in normal times, the frequency of price adjustment is approximately constant, and the microdata conform to the predictions of time-dependent models (e.g., Calvo 1983). Conditional on the path of aggregate cost shocks extracted from the data, a generalized state-dependent pricing model accounts well for both the low and stable inflation of the pre-pandemic period and the nonlinear surge that followed.
Liquidity and Fundamental Risks in a Search Economy
This paper studies the interplay between liquidity and fundamental risks in an asset pricing framework with a frictional, decentralized secondary market and endogenous trading decisions. In this setting, the liquidity value of assets decreases in the riskiness of the underlying. For a sufficiently large deterioration of fundamentals, agents stop trading the asset, leading to a freeze of the secondary market and flight-to-safety behavior. This mechanism implies a novel type of monetary “safe-trade” equilibrium, in which assets are traded if and only if safe. Liquidity feeds back into the default decision of the issuing firm, potentially leading to price spirals and a multiplicity of equity valuations and default thresholds.
Monetary Policy and Sovereign Risk, with L. Braccini
This paper estimates the effects of monetary policy on sovereign risk. We use proprietary intraday credit default swap (CDS) data on five European countries and identify the effects of monetary policy on CDS premia in a small time window around the European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy announcements. We construct monetary policy surprises for the press release and conference windows separately and show that there are two channels with effects of opposite sign. We then use stock price surprises to disentangle and interpret the two effects in terms of a standard monetary policy channel, in which CDS premia and interest rates co-move positively, and an information channel, in which they co-move negatively. We find that the information channel is quantitatively the most important. The results are robust across samples, maturities of CDS, and model specifications.
A benevolent planner chooses optimally whether and how to disclose publicly a private forecast of fundamentals to a large number of informed small agents. These agents interact in economic environments with information frictions, strategic complementarity or substitutability in actions, and a rich set of externalities that are responsible for inefficient fundamental and non-fundamental fluctuations. First, I characterize the optimal policy as a function of the externalities of the economy, the quality of the forecast of the planner, and agents’ prior uncertainty. Next, I discuss and interpret the theoretical results within the context of an application to central bank communication.
Work in progress
Granular Identification of Vector Autoregression Models, with H. Han, and Y. Selvakumar.
An Odd Approximation of Inflation, with A. Esbim, M. Gertler, S. Lenzu, and J. Tielens.