My Research Interests

I am currently interested in the redistributive role of monetary and fiscal policies in heterogeneous-agent economies where the liquidity properties of money and other financial assets are non-trivially obtained as equilibrium phenomena. I develop a competitive search environment with endogenous market segmentation to address these questions. As a by-product of this agenda, I have developed a fast solution algorithm borrowing insights from computational geometry to solve a class of heterogeneous-agent (search-theoretic) monetary economies (CSIM).

I am also investigating the phenomenon of interest rates dispersion and monetary policy pass-through in the banking sector using models where there is an essential or equilibrium-determined role for financial intermediation. I ask the questions of how search-friction induced equilibrium market power accounts for imperfect pass-through in loan rates and what this means for inefficiencies in the banking sector and hence the macroeconomy.

Related to my interest in markets with search and matching frictions, I am also working on an urban economics model that accounts for empirical observations of wage and housing-cost inequality across major cities, in conjunction with a stark pattern of dispersion in city-level political conservatism across these cities. This theory will be identified from and estimated to geo-politico-economic data. From that empirical basis, further statistical inference and counterfactual policy experiments can be conducted.

I have previously invented an approximate bilinear-programming approach to solving history-dependent policy games with heterogeneous agents (HARDPIG). I have also contributed to statistical inference of central bank policy preferences under the hypothesis that central banks conduct credible monetary policies in dynamic rational expectations economies (SOECB-Markov).