{"title":"Spread too thin: The impact of lean inventories","authors":"Julio L. Ortiz","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103932","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103932","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Widespread adoption of just-in-time (JIT) production has reduced inventory holdings. This paper measures the share of publicly traded manufacturing firms that adopted JIT since 1980 and quantifies a trade-off created by JIT between firm profitability and vulnerability to supply disruptions. Empirically, JIT adopters experience higher sales and less volatility on average while also exhibiting heightened sensitivity to aggregate supply chain pressures. I explain these facts in a structurally estimated general equilibrium model of JIT production. Relative to a counterfactual economy without JIT, the baseline model implies higher firm profitability in normal times but a deeper contraction amid a supply disruption. Moreover, a transition to an equilibrium with less JIT and larger inventory buffers leads to a roughly 4% output loss.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 103932"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147612071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FraNK: Fragmentation in the NK Model","authors":"Alessandro Moro, Valerio Nispi Landi","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103933","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103933","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We set up a multi-country New Keynesian model to study the effects of a geoeconomic fragmentation shock, modeled as an increase in the tax rates on goods, commodities, and bonds purchased from rival countries. First, we derive a closed-form solution of the model by using a symmetric calibration on two blocs of countries, and we show analytically that geoeconomic fragmentation reduces output. The effect on PPI inflation is ambiguous, depending positively on the importance of commodities in the production function. Then, we calibrate the model to five regions (the United States, their allies, China, a China-led bloc, and the neutral rest of the world), and we find that fragmentation predominantly affects China, the China-aligned bloc, and the US allies, with these countries experiencing larger declines in production and consumption. In contrast, the US are relatively shielded from the shock given their limited exposure to the rival bloc. The spillovers to neutral countries are negligible.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 103933"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147612069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cash or card? A structural model of payment choices","authors":"Francesco Lippi , Elia Moracci","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103930","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103930","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We use a large granular dataset to analyze the households’ choice between cash and card payments. Empirically, both the <em>size of the transaction</em> and the amount of <em>cash on hand</em> appear as significant covariates of the payment choice. We unveil a novel interaction between these two variables: the critical size for a card purchase depends on the amount of cash on hand. We present a tractable model of payment choices, featuring non-universal acceptance of cards by merchants, and a random expenditure flow. The model generates a precautionary motive for holding a cash buffer: cards are used to avoid “running out of cash”, accounting for the interaction discussed before. We use a calibrated version of the model to quantify the benefits of card ownership, the welfare costs of imperfect card acceptance by merchants, and to identify conditions under which a <em>cashless economy</em> emerges.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 103930"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147612068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Serdar Birinci , Fatih Karahan , Yusuf Mercan , Kurt See
{"title":"Labor Market Shocks and Monetary Policy","authors":"Serdar Birinci , Fatih Karahan , Yusuf Mercan , Kurt See","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103928","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103928","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We develop a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model with a frictional labor market and on-the-job search to study how employer-to-employer (EE) transitions affect macroeconomic outcomes and monetary policy. We show that accounting for market incompleteness quantitatively alters the positive and normative implications of EE fluctuations. Under imperfect self-insurance, when a higher EE rate causes higher inflation and a higher real interest rate, wealthy individuals — who are more sensitive to interest rate changes — cut consumption by more. As a result, an economy with perfect self-insurance overestimates the decline in aggregate demand when the EE rate is higher. The optimal simple monetary policy rule responds to inflationary pressures from a higher EE rate by raising the nominal rate less aggressively when markets are complete relative to a model with imperfect self-insurance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 103928"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147612067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment on “Artificial Intelligence and Technological Unemployment” by Wang and Wong","authors":"J. Carter Braxton","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103924","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103924","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 103924"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147612070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Firm idiosyncratic risk and productivity investment: Macroeconomic implications","authors":"Galina Vereshchagina","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103931","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103931","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper quantifies how idiosyncratic firm-level risk affects output, productivity and life-cycle firm growth in an environment in which the evolution of firm productivity is endogenous. It embeds firms’ risky productivity investment into a Lucas span-of-control model with risk-averse firm owners and endogenous firm entry and exit, and studies the effects of mean-preserving increases in the variance of returns to productivity investment. An increase in uncertainty that raises the firm exit rate by 10 percent (from 0.10 to 0.11) leads to a 0.73 percent decline in output, a 0.38 percent decline in measured TFP, and a 3.69 percent decline in firm productivity investment. If firms face capital financing constraints, as is common in developing economies, these effects are amplified and the increase in uncertainty may also lead to slower firm life-cycle growth.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 103931"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147612072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Life-cycle worker flows and cross-country differences in aggregate employment","authors":"Jonathan Créchet , Etienne Lalé , Linas Tarasonis","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103929","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103929","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cross-country employment differences are concentrated among women, youth, and older individuals. In this paper, we estimate employment, unemployment and labor-force participation flows by age and gender and study their contributions to aggregate employment differences across a large panel of European countries. Employment outflows are the main source of employment variation for prime-age men, whereas the inflows are quantitatively more important for women and young individuals. In addition, labor-force participation flows account for a substantial share of employment variation across all demographic groups. We develop and calibrate a life-cycle DMP model consistent with these facts. According to our model, endogenous labor-force participation and search intensity act as amplification mechanisms, allowing small differences in match productivity and job destruction rates to explain much of the cross-country differences in aggregate employment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"159 ","pages":"Article 103929"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147612073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Geography of job creation and job destruction","authors":"Moritz Kuhn , Iourii Manovskii , Xincheng Qiu","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103898","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103898","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Spatial differences in labor market performance are large and highly persistent. Using data from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, we document striking similarities across these countries in the spatial differences in unemployment, vacancies, and vacancy filling, job finding, and separation rates. The novel facts on the geography of vacancies and vacancy filling are instrumental in guiding and disciplining the development of a theory of local labor market performance. We find that a spatial version of a Diamond–Mortensen–Pissarides model with endogenous separations and on-the-job search quantitatively accounts for all the documented empirical regularities. The model also quantitatively rationalizes why differences in job-separation rates have primary importance in inducing differences in unemployment across space while changes in the job-finding rate are the main driver in unemployment fluctuations over the business cycle.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 103898"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146038753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distorted prices and targeted taxes in the New Keynesian Network model","authors":"Anastasiia Antonova , Gernot J. Müller","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103904","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103904","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>When confronted with sectoral shocks, policymakers often resort to targeted, sector-specific taxes in an <em>ad hoc</em> fashion. Based on the New Keynesian Network model, we characterize the optimal tax response to sectoral shocks: it features twice as many tax instruments as there are sectors, is budget-neutral, and not confined to the sector where the shock originates. We show that the optimal policy can be approximated by a simple rule that responds to inflation in the shocked sector and adjusts tax instruments in other sectors according to input–output linkages. We study its quantitative performance in a calibrated version of the model.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 103904"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146188536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The housing wealth effect: Quasi-experimental evidence","authors":"Jesper Böjeryd , Roine Vestman , Björn Tyrefors , Dany Kessel","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103892","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103892","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Empirical studies have estimated a large range of consumption responses to changes in housing prices. Using a quasi-experiment, we estimate a shock of <span><math><mrow><mo>−</mo><mn>19</mn><mo>.</mo><mn>4</mn></mrow></math></span> percent to single-family house prices in the area surrounding an airport in Stockholm after its operations were unexpectedly continued as a result of political bargaining behind closed doors. Using a household data set with information on the locations of primary residences relative to the airport, we find a short-run elasticity with respect to new car purchases of 0.28, corresponding to a one-year marginal propensity for expenditure on cars (car MPX) of 0.09 cents per dollar lost in housing wealth. Households with high loan-to-value ratios and small bank deposits respond the most. A quantitative model aligns with our empirical findings but also suggests that the car MPX could be 0.31 cents when used cars are included; of this, 73 percent is explained by a collateral channel. When nondurables are accounted for, the total marginal propensity to spend is 2.1 cents. In the case of an absolute fall in housing prices, the total response is four times greater.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 103892"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146078550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}