Demographics and Monetary Policy Shocks

We show that consumption expenditures for older households are more responsive to monetary policy shocks than for young‐ or middle‐aged households. A one‐standard‐deviation expansionary monetary policy shock induces a statistically significant and quantitatively large (1.7%) increase in aggregate consumption for old households over the ensuing 3 years. The responses for young‐ and middle‐aged households are smaller and not statistically significant. We also present evidence, suggesting that life‐cycle wealth effects play a role in driving the responses. We then build the wealth mechanism into a partial equilibrium life‐cycle model, which can qualitatively match the empirical patterns.