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JACOB MAROTT SUNDRAM

PhD Student

Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

I am doing a PhD in economics at the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen with expected completion in 2025. My research interests are in heterogeneous agent macroeconomics, business cycles, and international macroeconomics. I have teaching experience in both theoretical and empirical macroeconomics at the bachelor's and master's level.

RESEARCH

  • Fiscal Policy in Small Open Economies: The International Intertemporal Keynesian Cross (Submitted)
    A recent literature studies fiscal policy with realistic intertemporal marginal propensities to consume and the absence of Ricardian equivalence. They show that fiscal policy boosts consumption and is effective when monetary policy is passive: (i) Cumulative fiscal multipliers are above one and (ii) fiscal policy is fully self-financing. I show that these results do not extend to small open economies (SOEs). In SOEs, the initial debt-fueled rise in consumption is offset by a subsequent drop to pay back foreign debt, so (i) the cumulative fiscal multiplier is exactly one, and (ii) fiscal deficits are not fully self-financing.
  • The Transmission of Foreign Demand Shocks
    (with Jeppe Druedahl, Søren Hove Ravn, Laura Sunder-Plassmann, and Nicolai Waldstrøm)
  • Introducing heterogeneous households into a New Keynesian model of a small open economy enables the model to fit a set of stylized empirical facts about the transmission of foreign demand shocks. In the absence of a strong labor income effect on consumption, the model counterfactually implies that domestic consumption decreases as the central bank raises the interest rate to curb domestic inflation. With plausible marginal propensities to consume, the model instead produces the observed increase in domestic consumption of both tradeable and non-tradeable goods. This implies that foreign demand shocks are more important for international business-cycle comovement than predicted by existing models. Our findings also have implications for stabilization policies: While monetary policy is well-suited to counteract foreign demand shocks, traditional fiscal policies are inadequate, as they do not provide sufficient stimulus to the tradeable sector. This poses a particular challenge for countries with a fixed exchange rate or in a monetary union.
  • Foreign US Monetary Policy Spillovers: The Wealth Channel
    Work in progress

TEACHING

  • Fall 2023: Guest lecturer in Advanced Macroeconomics: Heterogenous Agent Models (graduate)
  • Fall 2022: Guest lecturer in Advanced Macroeconomics: Heterogenous Agent Models (graduate)
  • Spring 2022: Lecturer in Microeconomics A (undergraduate)
  • Fall 2021: Teaching assistant in Advanced Macroeconomics: Structural Vector Autoregressive Analysis (graduate)
  • Spring 2020: Teaching assistant in Principles of Economics B (undergraduate)