货币政策向消费的传导：性别和种族的不平等

Monetary Policy Transmission to Consumption:Inequalities by Gender and Race by Aina PuigPace University March2026 The author thanks Stephanie Aaronson, PraveenaBandara, Isabel Cairo, James Cloyne, Gerald Daniels, EvgeniyaDuzhak, Andres Fernandez, Ignacio Gonzalez,Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Oscar Jord ` a, Sylvain Leduc, Mieke Meurs,Juan Antonio Montecino, Makoto Nakajima, EmiNakamura, Albert Queralto, Eduardo Rawet, Xuguang SimonSheng, Na’ama Shenhav, Jon Steinsson, Eric Swanson,Mauricio Ulate, and seminar participants at severalconferences for valuable discussions, comments, and suggestions. All views and remaining errors in the paper are mine and are not necessarily those of the individuals or groups listedabove. The Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection presents research in progress by Levy Institute scholars andconference participants. The purpose of the series is to disseminate ideas to and elicit comments from academics andprofessionals. LevyEconomics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan,independently funded research organization devoted to public service. Through scholarship andeconomic research, it generates viable, effective public policy responsesto important economicproblems that profoundly affect the quality of life in the United States and abroad. Levy Economics InstituteP.O. Box 5000Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000http://www.levyinstitute.orgCopyright © Levy Economics Institute 2026All rights reservedISSN 1547-366X ABSTRACT This paper estimates the causal effects of monetary policy shocks on household consumption,with additional analysis of labor market and income responses, disaggregated by gender and race.I find that contractionary monetary policy reduces consumption more for black than white house-holds, with the largest declines among households headed by black women. These gaps persistafter accounting for differences in household education, debt, and income, but are partly ex-plained by differences in marital status and spousal insurance against shocks. These shocks alsolead households to shift expenditures from non-essential and durable goods toward essential non-durable goods and services. The analysis provides estimates of marginal propensities to consumeacross groups and shows that contractionary, rather than expansionary, shocks drive aggregateconsumption responses. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for intersectionaldemographic heterogeneity in evaluating the distributional effects of monetary policy. KEYWORDS: Monetary Policy; Gender; Racial Inequality; Intrahousehold AllocationJEL CODES: E21; E52; J15; J16 1INTRODUCTION Understanding the distributional effects of monetary policy is crucial for effective policy-making.Previous studies have emphasized that the effects of monetary shocks on household outcomesdiffer by wealth, income, or labor market outcomes (Auclert 2019; Cloyne et al. 2020; Coibionet al. 2017). Others explore the disproportionate burden of contractionary policy on certain racialgroups through labor market and wealth outcomes (Seguino and Heintz 2012; Bartscher et al. 2022;Amberg et al. 2022). However, no papers have estimated the effects of monetary policy on con-sumption responses by gender and race. It is therefore unclear whether consumption inequalitycan be fully understood by analyzing groups by education and finances, or whether other break-downs of groups can shed light on other mechanisms that determine responses. This paper addresses this question by documenting the transmission of monetary policy to con-sumption separately for white men, white women, black men, and black women. It is the first,to my knowledge, that estimates and explains consumption responses by gender and race witha state-of-the-art methodology and shock identification method. Contractionary policy shocksdecrease consumption, raise unemployment, and decrease income for groups at different rates.Studying heterogeneous reactions solely through income inequality obscures additional reasonswhy monetary policy affects groups differently. The analysis employs several data sources. I use the Consumer Expenditure Survey to measurehousehold consumption and income and the Current Population Survey to measure labor mar-ket outcomes. I use the monetary policy surprise series by Bauer and Swanson (2023), whichprovides a recent high frequency measure that is relevant and exogenous. This series measureshigh-frequency revisions to the expected path of monetary policy around FOMC announcements.I refer to these measured innovations as shocks hereafter. The use of high frequency shocks con-tributes to the literature on gender and racial inequality. I estimate the effects of monetary policy shocks from 1988 to 2019 using the local projectionsinstrumental variables methodology (Jord`a et al. 2020). Local projections have been widely usedto estimate the effects of monetary policy (Coibion et al. 2017; Bauer and Swanson 2023). I als