PIPages
Labs

Mikkel Plagborg-Moller

University of Chicago, IL·Social Science·Early-career

Economy-wide events do not hit everyone the same way. A recession, an interest rate change, or an oil price shock can hurt renters and help homeowners, or affect small firms differently from large ones.

Fields

Social Science

Mathematics & Statistics

Topics

econometrics

impulse response functions

heterogeneity

Grants
1 known grant, through Feb 2028

What they work on

  1. Develop an inference procedure with formal coverage guarantees for visualizing multi-dimensional cross-sectional heterogeneity, such as differences in dynamic response profiles across groups of households or firms.
  2. Provide a causal reinterpretation of popular methods for estimating temporal heterogeneity and nonlinearity in time series, including state-dependent and sign-dependent impulse responses.
  3. Run a large-scale simulation study comparing available impulse response estimators and translate the results into quantitative recommendations for choosing among competing procedures.
  4. Create a collection of interactive educational materials, including video content, teaching modern macroeconometric methods to students and policy practitioners.

More about the research

Detailed data on individual households and firms, together with cheap computing, have made it possible to study these differences, and concerns about whether growth benefits everyone have made it urgent. The statistical tools in routine use at universities, central banks, and policy institutions were not designed for this question: they are built to describe average responses, and they offer little guidance on how to report, or how much to trust, differences across groups and across time. This project develops econometric methods to fill that gap.

Why it matters

Central banks and other policy institutions rely on time series methods to judge how their decisions ripple through the economy, but currently lack reliable ways to quantify who is affected and by how much. Tools with valid uncertainty measures for group-level and state-dependent responses, plus evidence-based guidance on which estimator to use, could make distributional claims in policy analysis more trustworthy and make applied macroeconomic research easier to replicate.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

CAREER: Inference on Macroeconomic Heterogeneity

NSF · Jan 2026 – Feb 2028

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The school

University of Chicago: 39 labs on PI Pages, $681M a year on research, 457 research doctorates a year.

More about University of Chicago

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