Research
Fiscal Narratives and Inflation (with Sarah Arndt)
Status: Draft
Abstract: This paper investigates how media narratives on fiscal policy shape household’s inflation expectations. We collect a large corpus of newspaper articles report- ing on fiscal policy from four major German newspapers spanning from 2006 to March 2025. Using a large language model (ChatGPT) we introduce a strategy to automatically identify different fiscal narratives in text and construct narrative indices out of this data. We then estimate the effect of these narrative indices on household inflation expectations and find that they all have a positive significant effect varying in size. Lastly, we measure how fiscal narratives affect the trans- mission of a government spending shock to the economy and find that some of the narratives have an amplifying effect while others dampen the impact.
Domestic Revenue Mobilization in Low-Income Countries (with John-Paul Fanning and Thomas Augsten)
Status: Draft
Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of domestic revenue mobilization on economic growth, for a sample of 65 low income countries (LIC) over the period 1990-2019. Using local projection methods with the Arellano-Bond estimator, we analyze the impact of tax revenue increases on real GDP per capita growth and examine the transmission channels through consumption and investment. Our results suggest that a one percentage point increase in the tax-to-GDP ratio positively affects real GDP per capita growth on impact, with effects remaining statistically significant through the second year. The growth effects operate primarily through increased private consumption, while public and private investment show no significant response. These findings indicate that revenue mobilization in LICs works through consumption and confidence channels rather than investment channels, suggesting a missed opportunity to use additional fiscal resources for productivity-enhancing public investment that could support sustainable long-term growth.
HANK with Fiscal Policy
Status: Draft
The Denied Bailout: The Effect on Berlin’s Fiscal Policy (with Alfons J. Weichenrieder)
Status: Draft
Polymarket: An Overview of Decentralized Prediction Markets (with Basil Jan)
Status: Draft
Work in Progress
Bank Responses to Windfall Taxes- A European Natural Experiment (with Basil Jan)
Status: work in progress
Tariff Attention and Expectations (with Vandana Ramakrishnan)
Status: work in progress
From Bundestag to Economic Expectations: When Politicians Talk, Markets Listen Evidence from German Parliamentary Discourse (with Basil Jan)
Status: work in progress