Gert Peersman plans to work on the distributional consequences of macroeconomic shocks and the role of agent heterogeneity in the propagation mechanism of these shocks.

Following the existing literature and based on his previous work, he will start by focusing on monetary and fiscal policy shocks, but he will also analyse the consequences and propagation of energy prices, food commodity prices and weather shocks.

In this context, he proposes three research projects that are based on new datasets that are collected in ongoing projects.

Based on household budget surveys of several euro area countries, a first project will document the heterogeneous transmission of monetary policy to consumption and consumer prices across different household types. This question is important in a monetary union with large differences for instance in national housing and mortgage markets.

Based on a new digital platform that collects high-frequency information on individual agent behaviour in Belgium, he plans to study agent heterogeneity and the distributional aspects of financial and economic developments and policies: such as the impact of the covid crisis, the effects of fiscal policy measures, the monetary policy actions, energy price shocks etc.

Finally, using the monthly household survey dataset of the European Commission, he plans to study the heterogeneity in the formation of expectations across different households.