Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Dimensions Of Us Global Financial Power: Essays On Financial Sanctions, Global Imbalances, And Sovereign Default, Mariam Majd

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how U.S. capabilities in the global financial arena enable it to affect outcomes to its advantage. The first essay presents theoretical support for the hypothesis that holdings of U.S. sovereign debt collateralize public and private dollar borrowing in developing and emerging market economies. The second essay empirically tests the theory presented in Chapter 1 and provides evidence that, indeed, a statistically significant relationship exists between a country’s official holdings of US Treasury securities and its level of outstanding dollar credit. Our results demonstrate that even after controlling for a persistence effect (i.e., inertia) in US Treasury security …

Essays On Macro-Finance Affine Term Structure Models, Biancen Xie

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I focus on theoretical affine term structure models and the development of Bayesian econometric methods to estimate them.

In the first Chapter, we address the question of which unspanned macroeconomic factors are the best in the class of macro-finance Gaussian affine term structure models. To answer this question, we extend Joslin, Priebsch, and Singleton (2014) in two dimensions. First, following Ang and Piazzesi (2003) and Chib and Ergashev (2009), three latent factors, instead of the first three principal components of the yield curve, are used to represent the level, slope and curvature of the yield curve. Second …

Essays On Macroeconomics, Helu Jiang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cohabitation, Marriage, and Fertility: Divergent Patterns for Different Education Groups. The United States has been experiencing a long-term decline in the rates of marriage and fertility and a steady rise in cohabitation. Contradicting the prediction of standard theory that emphasizes the opportunity cost of childrearing from labor market and gender specialization, skilled females have experienced a less pronounced drop in marriage and fertility, while unskilled females have experienced a more evident increase in cohabitation. I propose the following mechanisms to understand this puzzle: for high-skilled females, the higher implicit return of investment in children’s human capital compensates for part of …

The Political Economy Of Accumulation In South Africa: Resource Extraction, Financialization, And Capital Flight As Barriers To Investment And Employment Growth, Seeraj Mohamed

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation uses a heterodox economics approach to explain poor levels of accumulation in South Africa. This approach to investment theory and models recognizes that many institutions are shaped to help people create stability in a world of fundamental uncertainty and irreversibility. Therefore, this dissertation examines the system of accumulation that developed in South Africa and its evolution. This approach to investment recognizes that beliefs and biases of people running institutions influence investment outcomes and shape ‘path dependence’. The corporations that grew to dominate the South African economy were formed during colonialism and apartheid. They grew around a core of …

The Business Cycle And Health: An Analysis Of How Macroeconomic Conditions Impact Health Outcomes In The U.S., Talitha Kumaresan

Honors Theses

The U.S. spends about twice as much per person on healthcare, yet the disease burden remains higher in the U.S. than in comparable countries (Sawyer and Cox 2018; Sawyer and Gonzales 2017). Although health status is perceived to be an outcome of individual decision making, the business cycle also affects health. While the effect of macroeconomic shocks on health outcomes has been studied extensively, results remain inconclusive. This analysis uses longitudinal data over 30 years and panel data models to examine the effect of macroeconomic conditions on obesity, diabetes, hypertension, depression, congestive heart failure, and heart attack or myocardial infarction. …

Rationality, Revisions, And Real-Time Data, Jason Hall

Honors Theses

Revisions to macroeconomic variables are a significant part of the process by which researchers, the general public, and the government get information about the state of the United States' economy. They are also substantial: this can have large implications for forecasting, macroeconomic research, business decisions, and monetary and fiscal policy. In this paper, I examine the cyclicality of various aggregate variables in U.S.data, and determine that of the major NIPA variables analyzed, only consumption andreal imports revisions display a large degree of cyclicality. I also examine the rationalityof the same set of variables under different definitions of the final value, …