The heating debate about increasing income inequality forces monetary policy makers and academia to (re‐)assess the nexus between (unconventional) monetary policy and inequality. We use a VAR framework to unveil the distributional effects of monetary policy and the role of redistribution in six advanced economies. While all of them experience an increase in Gini coefficients of gross income due to an expansionary monetary policy shock, only countries with relatively little redistribution display a significant response of net income inequality as well. To examine the underlying transmission channels we take a closer look at the sources of income, i.e. labor and capital income. Our findings suggest that the disproportional surge in capital income is the driving force behind the increase in net income inequality.

They do. Partly. We identify credit supply shocks via sign restrictions in a Bayesian VAR and separate them into positive and negative. Using local projections, we find that positive credit supply shocks leave notably different prints in private debt, mortgage debt, and debt-to-GDP, as opposed to negative credit supply shocks. This pattern is caused by the response of household mortgage debt. Furthermore, we find evidence that positive credit supply shocks are the driving force behind boom-bust cycles. Yet, developments behind the boom-bust cycle cannot explain the strong and persistent response in debt; but house prices tend to. However, if we abstract from potential asymmetries, we get rather mild results, which underestimate the true effects of credit supply shocks.