How do firms pass energy and food costs through the supply chain

Hela Mrabet and Jack Page

The rise in commodity prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had a direct and noticeable impact on consumers’ bills for energy and food. But firms also felt the brunt of higher costs. How did firms pass on these cost shocks through the supply chain and all the way onto consumer prices? How much and how quickly can firms pass through such large cost shocks? In this blog post, we combine information from Supply-Use tables with a rich industry-level data set on input and output price indices to shed light on these questions.

Continue reading “How do firms pass energy and food costs through the supply chain”

Monetary Policy Transmission: Borrowing Constraints Matter!

Fergus Cumming and Paul Hubert

How does the transmission of monetary policy depend on the distribution of debt in the economy? In this blog post we argue that interest rate changes are most powerful when a large share of households are financially constrained. That is, when a higher proportion of all borrowers are close to their borrowing limits. Our findings also suggest that the overall impact of monetary policy partly depends on the behaviour of house prices, and might not be symmetric for interest rate rises and falls.

Continue reading “Monetary Policy Transmission: Borrowing Constraints Matter!”