2025

Eyvazi, Ahya; Tavakolian, Hossein; Einian, Majid

Monetary policy is transmitted to the household sector through three main effects: the income effect, the wealth effect, and the substitution effect. The interaction of these effects with household heterogeneity gives rise to distributional transmission channels of monetary policy. the most important distributional channel is inflation, which shows how household heterogeneity in credit access affects the composition of household balance sheets, particularly the value of nominal assets and liabilities. This research tries to answer the question of how the distributional channel of inflation affects household wealth in the presence of occupational heterogeneity, as in Iran, the employment status of household members, particularly the head of the household, plays a key role in determining the level of access to credit. An analysis of Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) data reveals that households with at least one member employed in the banking sector (based on ISIC classification) have greater access to loans compared to other households. Based on this, this research uses panel data and estimates a weighted pooled model to examine how inflation affects the growth rate of durable goods - as an indicator of changes in household wealth - through occupational heterogeneity - as a measure of heterogeneity in access to credit during 2010-2021. It was expected that banking households, due to easier access to loans, would be more likely to purchase durable goods in response to inflation and benefit from the rising prices of these goods. However, the model’s estimation results indicate that the effect of inflation on the growth rate of durable expenditures is not statistically significant. This result is likely due to data limitations, as HIES tracks postal addresses rather than households, making it difficult to measure changes in household wealth accurately. For instance, if a household changes its residence due to access to mortgage loans, this change in housing wealth—an essential component of household assets—cannot be tracked using HIES data.