Household Responses to Direct Stimulus Payments and Other Shocks, 25th August 2022

    “Direct Stimulus Payments to Individuals in the Covid-19 Pandemic” is a project led by Professors Plutarchos Sakellaris from Athens University of Economics and Business, and Christos Kotsogiannis from the Tax Administration Research Centre, University of Exeter Business School. It is supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation and runs from November 2021 to November 2022.

    We are delighted to announce that the programme for our second workshop as part of this project, a virtual event to take place on 25th August 2022, is now finalized: 

    To register for this event, please use this link.

    You can also view the recording of the first workshop here.

    Date: Thursday August 25th 2022

    Time: 08:50 EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)

    Location: Online (through Zoom platform)

    OVERVIEW

    The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted economies and society on a scale never witnessed before. To protect lives and livelihoods and ensure business continuity, governments have implemented a plethora of relief measures, including in the fiscal area, resulting in increased borrowing to unprecedented levels. As most countries are constrained by their debt burden in the amount of fiscal resources, they can bring to the war against COVID-19, now and in the future, it is important to design fiscal policies carefully for optimal results. This second one-day virtual event brings together frontier academic research by scholars. The event focuses on the broad policy question: How much of an unexpected income transfer would the household spend for consumption during a short horizon? 

    In other words:

    • What is households’ Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) out of transitory income?
    • How is the marginal propensity to consumer affected by wealth, liquidity and other variables pertaining to the individual characteristics of the consumers?
    • And another related question is how households shift their financial positions and portfolios as a result of income shocks.

    The programme of the workshop is as follows:

    08:50 – 09:00 EDT: Welcome and housekeeping

    09:00 – 10:00 EDT : Paper 1: ‘The Anatomy of Consumption in a Household Foreign Currency Debt Crisis,’ (Gyozo Gyongyosi [Leibniz Institute of Financial Research SAFE], Judit Rariga [European Central Bank] and Emil Verner [MIT])

    Discussant: Dimitris Christelis (University of Glasgow)

    10:00 – 11:00 EDT: Paper 2:

    ‘Fiscal Stimulus, Inter- and Intratemporal Consumption Spending: Evidence from a 5 Billion Euro Experiment,’ (Gregor Pfeifer (University of Sydney), Davud Rostam-Afschar [University of Mannheim], Tim Ruberg [University of Honenheim] and Lukas Treber [University of Honenheim])

    Discussant: Michael Boutros (Bank of Canada)

    11:00 – 11:15 EDT: Break

    11:15 – 12:15 EDT: Paper 3: ‘Who are the Hand to Mouth?’ (Marc Aguiar [Princeton University], Mark Bils [University of Rochester] and Corina Boar [New York University])

    Discussant: Krisztina Molnar (NHH Norwegian School of Economics)

    12:15 EDT: Closing Remarks

    The workshop will follow the 30-20-10 rule: 30 minutes for presentation, 20 minutes for discussion and 10 minutes for general discussion.

    The research project is supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the 4th Call for Action “Science and Society”- Emblematic Action – “Interventions to address the economic and social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic” (project ID: FISCALCONS 05007)