A “reverse Robin Hood”? The distributional implications of non-standard monetary policy for Italian households

By Marco Casiraghi, E. Gaiotti, Lisa Rodano, A. Secchi. Journal of International Money and Finance, 2017

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study empirically the distributional implications of a non-standard monetary policy expansion, considering the measures implemented by the Eurosystem in 2011-2012 and exploiting a rich micro dataset on Italian households’ income and wealth, in order to take contemporaneously into account a number of income- and wealth-related channels. Our results do not support the claim that an unconventional monetary loosening acts as a “reverse Robin Hood”. Larger benefits accrue to households at the bottom of the income scale, as the effects via the stimulus to economic activity and employment outweigh those via financial variables. The response of net wealth is U-shaped: less wealthy households take advantage of their leveraged positions, wealthier households of their larger share of financial assets. Overall, the effects on inequality are negligible. The results also suggest that the risk of an “expropriation of savers” is not likely to materialize, as the decrease in the remuneration of savings is compensated by support to labour income and by capital gains.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ad625014deb6c995797f306e9edd95f54723210

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Citations in the corpus

How Does Monetary Policy Affect Income and Wealth Inequality? Evidence from Quantitative Easing in the Euro Area (2018, background): “Casiraghi et al. (2018) (on Italian data) and, at least partly, Bunn et al. (2018) (on UK data) also focus on unconventional monetary policy.”
CENTRAL BANK POLICIES AND INCOME AND WEALTH INEQUALITY: A SURVEY (2019, unknown): “18 Two recent papers employ large-scale econometric models of the Italian (Casiraghi et al. , 2018) and the U.K. economy (Bunn et al., 2018) to evaluate the aggregate effects of nonstandard monetary policy on income and wealth inequality in the postcrisis period.”