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Sebastian Rast

Research Economist

De Nederlandsche Bank

I am a Research Economist in the Monetary Policy Department at De Nederlandsche Bank.

I obtained my PhD at the European University Institute in Florence under the supervision of Evi Pappa and Leonardo Melosi. During my PhD, I visited the University of California at Berkeley and have been a PhD Trainee in the Monetary Policy Strategy Division at the European Central Bank.

My research interests include macroeconomics, monetary policy, applied macroeconometrics and inflation expectations. You can find my CV here.

Note: This is my personal webpage and the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the official position of De Nederlandsche Bank or the Eurosystem.

Education

  • PhD in Economics, 2022

    European University Institute

  • Visiting PhD student, 2019

    University of California, Berkeley

  • Master in Economics, 2015

    Barcelona Graduate School of Economics

  • BSc in Economics, 2014

    University of Mannheim

Working papers

Long-run inflation expectations

Professional forecasters’ long-run inflation expectations overreact to news and exhibit persistent, predictable biases in forecast errors. A model incorporating overconfidence in private information and a persistent expectations bias - which generates persistent forecast errors across most forecasters - accounts for these two features of the data, offering a valuable tool for studying long-run inflation expectations. Our analysis highlights substantial, time-varying heterogeneity in forecasters’ responses to public information, with sensitivity declining across all forecasters when monetary policy is constrained by the effective lower bound. The model provides a framework to evaluate whether policymakers’ communicated inflation paths are consistent with anchored long-run expectations.

Regressive Trend Inflation

We identify innovations to trend inflation (rather than to inflation) using a standard trend-cycle model to investigate their aggregate and distributional effects. These innovations generate a persistent and sizable contraction in economic activity and are regressive. They harm poor households through the income and expenditure channels and benefit them through the asset holdings channel, and less so through the revaluation channel. We uncover a new operative channel for regressive trend inflation, the liability channel, which is claimed to be very relevant. Rich households raise their liabilities in order to smooth their consumption and reduce their real debt burden in the long run. Finally, we use an IV approach to extract trend inflation shocks driven by (i) oil supply news, (ii) monetary policy, and (iii) tax changes. Irrespective of the source, trend inflation shocks turn out to be regressive.

Central Bank Communication with the General Public: Survey Evidence from Germany

This paper studies the effect of different types of monetary policy announcements on household inflation expectations based on micro data from a survey of German households. As a key feature, interviews of the survey were conducted both shortly before and after monetary policy events. This timing provides a natural experiment to identify the immediate effects of policy announcements on household inflation expectations. The availability of the survey over a period of 15 years further allows me to exploit the time-series dimension to estimate the medium-term effects of policy announcements. Policy rate announcements lead to quick and significant adjustments in household inflation expectations. Announcements about forward guidance and quantitative easing, by contrast, have no or only smaller and delayed effects.