Alex Houtz

Welcome to my website! I am a PhD candidate at the University of Notre Dame specializing in the interaction of fiscal and monetary policy. My work incorporates time series econometrics, high-frequency identification, and state-of-the-art heterogeneous agent models.

I will be on the 2025/2026 job market and am available for interviews.

You can find my CV here.

My job market paper is titled:
“How Government Debt Shocks Impact the Economy”

Abstract: I identify exogenous government debt shocks using high-frequency movements in U.S. Treasury futures prices around auction announcements. In a VAR, these shocks raise interest rates across the yield curve, including the federal funds rate, while prices increase, output falls, unemployment rises, and the monetary base shrinks. I interpret these findings as evidence of fiscal dominance and show that a standard monetary-dominant model cannot replicate the empirical impulse responses. In an estimated business cycle model, I find that debt shocks offset part of the disinflation of the 1980s, contributed to growth in the 1990s, and slowed the recovery from the Great Recession.

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