Department of Economics hosts our first Department Seminar this Fall. Our new colleague, Oni, will introduce us to his work. See the link for his draft.
Time and place: Thursday, Oct 2, 12-1:15 pm, JC 118
Title: Commuting, Home Utilities, and Production: The Distributional Effects of Energy Price Shocks
Abstract: Energy price shocks are large and persistent relative to other price shocks. How do these shocks affect households across income groups? To quantify the welfare effects of energy price shocks, I develop a heterogeneous-agent incomplete market model featuring non-homothetic consumption preferences, commuting costs, and energy as a factor of production for non-energy goods, taking the energy price as exogenous. A calibrated version of the model successfully reproduces many salient features of United States data, including the cross-sectional distributions of employment, income, wealth, and expenditure shares on energy consumption for both commuting and residential utilities. Quantitatively, I find that a positive energy price shock similar to the one in 2021 results in disproportionate welfare losses across income groups, with the bottom quintile losing almost twice as much as the top quintile in terms of consumption on impact. While the shock’s direct impact on consumption dominates for low-income households, high-income households are mainly affected through changes in wage and rental rate. I also show that between work-from-home and targeted transfers, the former boosts welfare but widens consumption inequality, while the latter does the opposite.
