Monetary policy and inequality: A two-way relation

We study the transmission of monetary policy in the presence of heterogeneous households and examine the implications when the share of constrained households is a function of monetary policy. We build an analytically tractable heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model (THANK) with an endogenous share of hand-to-mouth households. The transmission of monetary policy on aggregate demand is amplified in this setup by inequality between saver and hand-to-mouth households. The amplification effect depends on monopolistic rents (enhancing) and redistribution (mitigating). Unlike most THANK models, we refrain from the assumption of a full insurance steady state.