About

Thomas Drechsel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, awarded in 2019. His primary field of interest is macroeconomics, where he contributes to advancing the understanding of monetary economics. In addition to his academic roles, he serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Monetary Economics. Drechsel actively shares his research insights through various platforms, including his personal website, Google Scholar, Repec, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky. He has also discussed some of his work on the Macro Musings podcast.

Research topics

• Economics
• Econometrics
• Geophysics
• Geology
• Macroeconomics
• Climatology
• Monetary economics
• Keynesian economics
• History
• Environmental science
• Meteorology
• Geography

Selected publications

• Replication package for: Political Pressure on the Fed

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-01-06

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This package contains data and codes for "Political Pressure on the Fed" by Thomas Drechsel, published in the Review of Economic Studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Data and Code for "Identifying Monetary Policy Shocks: A Natural Language Approach"

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Data and Code for "Identifying Monetary Policy Shocks: A Natural Language Approach". The abstract of the paper is as follows: We develop a novel method for the identification of monetary policy shocks. By applying natural language processing techniques to documents that Federal Reserve staff prepare in advance of policy decisions, we capture the Fed's information set. Using machine learning techniques, we then predict changes in the target interest rate conditional on this information set and obtain a measure of monetary policy shocks as the residual. We show that the documents' text contains essential information about the economy which is not captured by numerical forecasts that the staff include in the same documents. The dynamic responses of macro variables to our monetary policy shocks are consistent with the theoretical consensus. Shocks constructed by only controlling for the staff forecasts imply responses of macro variables at odds with theory. We directly link these differences to the information that our procedure extracts from the text over and above information captured by the forecasts.

  PublisherDOI

• The Macroeconomic Effects of Bank Regulation: New Evidence from a High-Frequency Approach

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: Political Pressure on the Fed

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-01-06

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This package contains data and codes for "Political Pressure on the Fed" by Thomas Drechsel, published in the Review of Economic Studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Data and Code for "Identifying Monetary Policy Shocks: A Natural Language Approach"

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Data and Code for "Identifying Monetary Policy Shocks: A Natural Language Approach". The abstract of the paper is as follows: We develop a novel method for the identification of monetary policy shocks. By applying natural language processing techniques to documents that Federal Reserve staff prepare in advance of policy decisions, we capture the Fed's information set. Using machine learning techniques, we then predict changes in the target interest rate conditional on this information set and obtain a measure of monetary policy shocks as the residual. We show that the documents' text contains essential information about the economy which is not captured by numerical forecasts that the staff include in the same documents. The dynamic responses of macro variables to our monetary policy shocks are consistent with the theoretical consensus. Shocks constructed by only controlling for the staff forecasts imply responses of macro variables at odds with theory. We directly link these differences to the information that our procedure extracts from the text over and above information captured by the forecasts.

  PublisherDOI

• Political Pressure on the Fed

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2026-04-17 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify variation in political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not necessarily reflect political pressure, I develop a narrative identification strategy based on President Nixon’s pressure on Fed Chair Burns. I exploit this narrative through restrictions on a structural vector autoregression that includes the President-Fed interaction data. I find that political pressure to ease monetary policy (i) increases the price level strongly and persistently, (ii) does not lead to positive effects on real economic activity, (iii) contributed to inflationary episodes outside of the Nixon era, and (iv) transmits differently from a typical monetary policy easing, by having a stronger effect on inflation expectations. Quantitatively, increasing political pressure by half as much as Nixon, for six months, raises the price level by about 7% over the following decade.

  PublisherDOI

• Optimal Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Regimes in Commodity-Exposed Economies

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Estimating the Effects of Political Pressure on the Fed: A Narrative Approach with New Data

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Income Inequality and Job Creation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-11-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Long and Variable Lags of Monetary Policy: Evidence from Disaggregated Price Indices

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Iván Petrella

  University of Warwick

  14 shared

• Silvana Tenreyro

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  13 shared

• Juan Drechsel Antolin-Diaz

  London Business School

  11 shared

• Ben Broadbent

  7 shared

• Philipp Schnabl

  7 shared

• Federico Di Pace

  Bank of England

  7 shared

• R. J. Harrison

  University of Cambridge

  4 shared

• Wouter J. Den Haan

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Economics

  London School of Economics

  2019