Macroeconomics Commons^™

Essays In Retirement Economics, Gunnar Poppe Yanez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters.

Chapter 1

The discrepancy between the high demand for annuities predicted by economic theory and the empirical low holdings of these assets, known as the annuity puzzle, is still not completely understood in economic studies of retirement finance. This paper assesses the effect of individuals' mortality risk learning process on annuitization. I isolate this effect by building a life-cycle model in which individuals have imperfect information of their true survival probability distribution, and therefore have to update their beliefs about it in a Bayesian manner. Using data on subjective mortality by the Health and …

Oil Price Changes And Unemployment Rate In The U.S. And Chile, Agamani Maity

Master's Theses

Abstract

There is a recurring question in theoretical, empirical and policy work is what the effects of higher oil prices are on the country’s macroeconomic aggregates. Empirical evidence in support of the view that fluctuation in the economy due to the interaction of macroeconomic variables is caused by oil price was based on inappropriate econometric models. These studies do not capture the composition of the price of oil that is affected by the exogenous oil shocks and has an indirect or direct impact on the macroeconomic aggregates. In this study, we decompose the change in oil prices into three structural …

A Macroeconomic Investigation Of The Labor Market Matching Efficiency, Sarah M. Welch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first section of this research explores how traditional measures of unemployment can mask important changes in the labor market across the business cycle. We therefore use broader definitions of unemployment to estimate time-varying job-matching efficiency rates that are consistent with vacancies and hiring activity data for the U.S. Our efficiency rates are then modeled along with employment data to study their dynamic, non-linear relationship. We find that including part-time workers for economic reasons as well as marginally attached workers helps explain the changes in employment patterns observed after the global financial crisis, emphasizing the importance of accounting for underemployment, …