Upcoming Events
Macroepidemics and unconventional monetary policy
Mar 19, 2021, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
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Meeting password: kPPs3JPne58
Join us to hear Verónica Acurio Vásconez, Olivier Damette and David Shanafelt discuss their work on macroepidemics and unconventional monetary policy .
Abstract
Despite the fact that the current covid-19 pandemic was neither the first nor the last disease to threaten a pandemic, only recently have studies incorporated epidemiology into macroeconomic theory. In our paper, we use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with a financial sector to study the economic impacts of epidemics and the potential for unconventional monetary policy to remedy those effects. By coupling a macroeconomic model to a traditional epidemiological model, we are able to evaluate the pathways by which an epidemic affects a national economy. We find that no unconventional monetary policy can completely remove the negative effects of an epidemic crisis, save perhaps an exogenous increase in the shares of claims coming from the Central Bank (“epi loans”). To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first to incorporate disease dynamics into a DSGE-SIR model with a financial sector and examine the effects of unconventional monetary policy.
Speaker Bios
Dr. Verónica Acurio Vásconez is an Associate Professor at the University of Lorraine and member of the Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée (BETA). She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. She teaches undergraduate courses in mathematics and macroeconomics, and graduate courses in energy economics and finance. Her research interests broadly include DSGE models, macroeconomic dynamics, energy economics, and unemployment and monetary policy, though recently she has started working on the coupling of epidemiological and macroeconomic models. She actively participates in research projects linking energy transitions and GDP fluctuations.