Research
WORKING PAPERS
“Does the Financial Accelerator accelerate inequalities?”
[CefES-DEMS WPS (2024)] [New Draft (2026)] [Cite]
I show that corporate financial frictions affect not only the strength of monetary transmission, but also its distributional incidence. Following monetary tightening, weaker firm balance sheets and tighter external financing conditions amplify losses among households most reliant on current earnings and limited self-insurance. Labor-income exposure, rather than household leverage, is therefore the key distributional margin in this framework: corporate distress reaches households through firms’ demand for labor. This mechanism remains robust with household illiquid assets, which broaden transmission channels without displacing labor income as the dominant force. The financial accelerator raises welfare costs and concentrates additional losses among low-wealth households.
Presented at: Unimib PhD macro presentations (Milan, 2023), Unibs economics seminar (Brescia, 2023), International EPOC Doctoral Workshop (Venice, 2024), Unicatt Macro Lunch Seminar (Milan, 2024), XXV Conference on International Economics (Alicante, 2024), CEPET Workshop (Udine, 2024), EPOC International Conference (Milan, 2024), Sapienza Macro Workshop (Rome, 2024), 5th Sailing the Macro Workshop (Ortigia, 2025), Unisa Research Seminar (Salerno, 2025)
“Uneven Frictions, Uneven Households: The Inequality Trade-off of Monetary Policy”
(Formerly titled “Effects of different financial frictions on households”)
[Sapienza WPS (2025)] [New Draft (2026)] [Cite]
Does the location of financial frictions significantly change the distributional consequences of monetary policy? Using a HANK model, I compare transmission under firm-side and household-side financial accelerators. I document a state-dependent trade-off: while firm-side frictions amplify wealth inequality by depressing labor income, household-side frictions generate a significantly larger spike in consumption inequality. This divergence is driven by the behavior of the household borrowing spread and its impact on agents near the zero-wealth threshold. Under firm frictions, households use credit to smooth indirect income shocks; under household frictions, rising spreads directly choke off liquidity, trapping a larger share of agents in hand-to-mouth status. These findings highlight that the ``inequality cost” of monetary policy depends critically on the specific origin of credit market stress
Presented at: II Milan PhD Economics Workshop (Milan, 2024), Sapienza Macro Workshop (Rome, 2025)
“Inflation Inattention and the Consumption Gap”
with Giovanni Di Bartolomeo and Carolina Serpieri
This paper studies why inflation inattention varies across households and over time, and how such variation shapes monetary transmission. We propose a behavioral mechanism, grounded in reference dependence and relative consumption, through which inflation inattention depends on the consumption gap between asset holders and non-asset holders. Consistent with this intuition, U.S. data suggest a negative reduced-form relationship between the consumption gap and inflation inattention. Motivated by this pattern, we develop a Two-Agent New Keynesian model with imperfect information in which asset holders endogenously reduce inattention when the consumption gap widens. The mechanism improves the accuracy of inflation expectations and inflation stabilization after cost-push shocks, but at the cost of a deeper contraction in real activity and lower welfare in inefficient steady states.
Presented at: Unicatt Macro Lunch Seminar (Milan, 2025), ASSET annual meeting* (Rabat, 2025), IV WINTER Workshop (Granada, 2025), Unimib Relunch Seminar (Milan, 2025), 33rd Symposium SNDE* (Lisbon, 2026), 30th ICMAIF (Rethymno, 2026)
(*Presented by co-author)