Welcome to my personal website. I am a Senior Lecturer at Magdeburg University and affiliated with the Department of Economics at Tilburg University. I hold a PhD in Economics from Leipzig University.

Research interests: (Monetary) Macroeconomics, in particular:

1. Monetary and Fiscal Policy

2. Search-and-Matching Theory

3. Heterogeneous Agent Models

Abstract

Households spend time finding goods, yet the New Keynesian (NK) model treats buying as frictionless. We add costly search effort and goods market matching to a benchmark NK model with sticky wages, unemployment, and home production. The price elasticity of demand and capacity utilization become endogenous and move with goods market tightness, a second slack margin next to unemployment. Shocks traverse all four Barro–Grossman regimes, and transmission depends on the regime: search prices dampen every shock, while tightness reinforces this when goods and labor markets move together in gaps and overturns it when they diverge strongly. Search-price growth acts like expected inflation, more than doubling the slope of the dynamic IS curve: along monetary policy shocks, demand responds about two and a half times less to the real interest rate, closer to near-zero estimates, and real GDP about a third less. Markup, technology, and matching-efficiency shocks are amplified on impact; inflation is dampened throughout. The Phillips curve becomes search-augmented but keeps its output-gap slope, and every shock carries an endogenous cost-push component whose sign depends on its regime. Costly search and monopolistic competition distort jointly, not additively. The regimes require both nominal rigidities and are robust across 27 variants.

Abstract

Measured productivity fluctuates far more over the business cycle than technology. This paper shows that these movements mainly reflect coordination failures in the goods market. I develop a New Keynesian DSGE model, inspired by Barro’s (2025) critique of frictionless goods markets, in which households allocate time between work and search, firms supply unmatched capacity, and trades form through goods-market search and matching. Matching efficiency determines capacity utilization and thus measured TFP. Bayesian estimation on U.S. and Euro Area data – using survey- based capacity utilization – shows that incorporating goods-market frictions sharply improves model fit and reduces the need for cost-push shocks. The interaction of sticky posted prices and flexible search prices generates a state-dependent demand elasticity, while the coordination channel links search effort to effective output: excess demand raises TFP by increasing match rates, excess supply lowers it by leaving capacity idle. The model identifies Barro–Grossman (1971) regimes in the data: the missing deflation after 2008 reflects a low-efficiency, classical-unemployment regime, whereas the post-COVID inflation surge arises from a high-tightness, repressed-inflation regime. Thus, short-run productivity is coordination-driven, and policy operates in a state-dependent environment where stabilizing market efficiency is as important as managing demand.

 Published Report