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Working Paper

The Geographic Effects of Monetary Policy

We study the differential regional effects of monetary policy exploiting geographical heterogeneity in income across cities in the United States. We find that prices and employment in poorer cities react more to monetary policy shocks. The results for prices hold for a wide range of narrow consumer expenditure categories. The results are consistent with New Keynesian models that allow for a differential share of hand-to-mouth consumers across regions, but not with models in which regions have different slopes of the Phillips curve. We show that an increase in heterogeneity across cities amplifies the effect of monetary policy on prices and employment.

Working Papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Federal Reserve System.


Suggested Citation

Pedemonte, Mathieu, and Juan Herreño. 2022. “The Geographic Effects of Monetary Policy.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper No. 22-15. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-202215