**Presented at**: University of Naples Federico II, European Central Bank, Bank of Italy, Bank of Spain, G4 Monetary Policy Meetings, the Conference on the Macroeconomics of Expectations
_Finalist at the 2022 ECB Young Economist Prize_
**Presented at**: Boston University, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, IE University, Federal Reserve Board, European Central Bank, Central Bank of Italy, Central Bank of Denmark, Central Bank of the Netherlands, Central Bank of Lithuania, 2021 European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, Theories and Methods in Macroeconomics, Philadelphia FED Mortgage Market Research Conference, 47th Simposio of the Spanish Economic Association, Financial Stability Policies in a Changing Lending Landscape Conference
Which words matter the most in central bank communication? Making use of a rather unique European monetary policy decision setting, we build the first monetary policy dictionary. We train the dictionary on high frequency movements of the stock market around press conferences of the European Central Bank. This allows us to precisely identify which phrases do the market mainly reacts to. We find that phrases such as "Improved economy", "Market development", and "Stability of the euro" are associated with positive returns. On the other hand, phrases such as "Heightened uncertainties" and "Growth of loans" are associated with negative returns.
Teaching Assistant for the Ph.D. level Macroeconomics class. Fall 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2017.
Households’ income fluctuations in poor countries call for risk smoothing mechanisms, yet insurance is always found to be incomplete. We build a two-goods complete markets model, and confirm this result with the UNPS - a new representative Uganda household-level panel data. The empirical evidence suggests that the degree of consumption insurance differs across consumption goods: Households insure food better than other non-durables.