2022 Theses Doctoral

Disentangling Macroeconomic Policies

Acosta, Jose Miguel

The field of macroeconomics has increasingly turned its attention towards understanding the state dependent effects of macroeconomic policies, the idea being that different macroeconomic conditions—e.g., the state of the business cycle, or the distribution of income over the population—can cause a single economic policy shock to propagate differently through the economy. I turn this thinking around in this dissertation, and instead ask whether the policies that we study are, in practice, “single economic policy shocks” or are, instead, aggregates of multiple policies with different effects.

In chapter 1, I decompose monetary policy into an interest rate component, and a component that captures macroeconomic information provision. In chapter 2, I discuss the consequences of tariff policy in light of the view that tariffs in the United States are extremely heterogeneous and, on average, regressive in nature. In chapter 3, I return to monetary policy, asking whether more-transparent communications from the Federal Reserve have allowed for a more effective transmission of monetary policy. To summarize my findings, in all cases I find that the economic consequences estimated using disaggregated policy measures differ substantially from the consequences estimated using aggregated measures.