Macroeconomics Commons^™

Explaining The Proliferation Of U.S. Billionaires During The Neoliberal Period, Rob Piper

Class, Race and Corporate Power

This article explains the proliferation of U.S. billionaire wealth during the neoliberal period (1980 to the present). Using the work of scholars, investigative journalists, and government researchers, it examines descriptive evidence from the past forty years of the economic, social, and political trends associated with the capital accumulation that led to so much wealth being concentrated with so few individuals. It further creates a theoretical framework of institutional factors (or “drivers”) that help to understand how these trends link together to provide a comprehensive explanation for the increase of billionaires in comparison with other economic gauges like GDP, income distribution, …

The Institutional Drivers Contributing To Billionaire Wealth At The Sector Level, Rob Piper

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Over the last 50 years (the period of neoliberalism) the national wealth of the United States reached unprecedented levels. Despite this dramatic increase in national wealth, an increasing amount of American wealth has found its way into the hands of a smaller percentage of the population. Indicative of this inequality, the number of individuals that have achieved a net worth of $1 billion (billionaires) has increased at a higher rate than any other time in American history. Descriptive evidence and analysis of macroeconomics from scholarly literature and journalism attributes this dramatic increase in billionaire wealth to certain comprehensive and interrelated …

Essays On The Economic Effects Of Income Inequality, Adir Dos Santos Mancebo Junior

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Income inequality has been rising throughout the world. In the United States, for example, the income share of the population at the top 10% of the income distribution rose 34% from 1980 to 2019 according to data from the World Inequality Database. This dissertation studies how increasing levels of income inequality might affect the economy.

In the first chapter, I show that changes in the level of income inequality may affect consumption volatility through changes in household aggregate marginal propensity to consume (MPC). I propose a simple theoretical framework to explain this dynamic and evaluate it empirically, combining data from …

Essays On Macroeconomics And Financial Economics, Maryam Aljahani

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation comprises of three Essays. The first essay classifies households as savers and borrowers based on their wealth during the credit cycle. It examines the wealth effects of the saving and housing decisions of heterogeneous households over a credit cycle. To do so, we employ the Difference-in-Difference estimator and find evidence of a significant difference between the wealth effect for savers and borrowers. In the second essay, we examine the extent to which credit-constrained households are able to accumulate wealth when the macro environment is characterized by the presence of a liquidity trap and borrowing constraints. Our evidence highlights …

Essays In Labor Economics And International Economics, Seyed Javad Nosratabadi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation includes three essays in labor economics and international economics. The first essay studies the relationship between the amount of a loan demanded by firms and their labor demand. Governments have developed small loan programs with a reduced interest rate to decrease unemployment in Iran. Using longitudinal, firm-level data from the years 2005 to 2010 in Iran, this study examines the effect of one Iranian province's loan program on employment based on two different methods of evaluating causal effects. The first method applies a difference-in-difference fixed effects matching estimator to estimate the employment effect of the program. The second …

Essays On Macroeconomic Analysis Of Development, Nazmul Islam

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation includes three essays on empirical studies of macroeconomic analysis of development. The first and second chapter focus on defining different categories of households based on the type of wealth they hold, deriving their demographic characteristics and how they react to transitory income shocks. The economics literature splits households into poor hand-to-mouth (P-HtM), wealthy hand-to-mouth (W-HtM), and not hand-to-mouth (N-HtM). This breakdown is important to accurately capture how different categories of households react to income shocks.

In Chapter 1, I argue that this classification is missing important features related to the behavior of indebted households. Thus, novel in the …

Essays On International Macroeconomics And Monetary Policy, Renzo M. Alvarez Oyola

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A sound monetary policy depends on a solid understanding of how external shocks reverberate throughout the economy. This is particularly true in emerging market economies under the inflation targeting (IT) framework since these economies tend to be subject to large external shocks, and don't have a long IT track record. My dissertation studies the macroeconomic consequences of external shocks under IT in emerging market economies, and the policy response to such shocks.

The first chapter studies whether foreign exchange interventions (FXI) are effective under IT in the context of commodity prices shocks. It also explores the extent to which lack …

Three Essays On Growth, Housing Market And Inequality, Shahrzad Ghourchian

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation includes three essays on growth, the housing market, and inequality. In the first essay, I analyze the effects of government consumption and government debt on long-run economic growth by considering the economic characteristics of the countries investigated. Linear regressions reveal that government consumption has a much bigger negative impact on long-run growth compared with the negative (and sometimes insignificant) effects of government debt. Nonlinear analyses further show that such effects are highly impacted by the economic characteristics of the countries investigated.

In the second essay, I study time-series fluctuations in the United States housing market from 2010 to …

Resource Nationalism And Energy Integration In Latin America: The Paradox Of Populism, Brian Hollingsworth

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between resource nationalism and energy integration, and uses Bolivia and Brazil as a test case. Essentially, does resource nationalism affect energy integration? The findings nest within more expansive questions on international political economy and export-driven models of development. Why do populist regimes, historically operating under an economic nationalist cum protectionist paradigm, simultaneously pursue policies of economic integration? What is the relationship between resource nationalists and open markets, especially in the hydrocarbons sector? What is the relationship between populists, who are typically resource nationalists, and their decision to choose policies of energy integration?

The most common …

Three Essays On International Trade And Finance, Syed A. Uddin

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three essays at the intersection of international trade and finance. In the first chapter, I measure exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) for value-added exports, where intermediate input requires sharing among countries in a back-and-forth manner for producing a single final product. I derive an estimating equation for ERPT and value-added trade following a partial equilibrium model, which also leads to decomposition of the trade elasticity into the own price effect and the price index effects. From the empirical estimation, I find that ignoring the value-added trade will cause a systematic upward bias in the estimation of …

Three Essays In Financial Economics, Qianying Zhang

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first paper revisits the link between interest rates and corporate bond credit spreads by applying Rigobon’s (2003) heteroskedasticity identification methodology. The second paper investigates the assumption that financial asset prices including stocks and bonds, reflect intrinsic value. The third paper decomposes the stock price into fundamental permanent, fundamental transitory, and non-fundamental shocks in order to explore the determinants of stock price fluctuations.

The Effects Of Commodity Disturbances On Open Economics, Richard Whitaker

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the effects of commodity disturbances on underlying economies. The analysis conducted in this dissertation comprises of two main themes. The first is investigating which commodity disturbances affect a country's GDP. I examine twenty three OECD countries and nineteen primary commodities in the energy, metal, food and timber sectors using a New Keynesian model that was estimated using the DSGE method. It was found the oil disturbances and to a lesser extend natural gas were the only commodity disturbances that affect a country's GDP. Also, it was found that a country's openness plays an important role in shaping …

Business Cycle Effects On Us Sectoral Stock Returns, Keran Song

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation investigated business cycle effects on US sectoral stock returns.

The first chapter examined the relationship between the business cycle and sectoral stock returns. First, I calculated constant correlation coefficients between the business cycle and sectoral stock returns. Then, I employed the DCC GARCH model to estimate time-varying correlation coefficients for each pair of the business cycle and sectoral stock returns. Finally, I ran regression of sectoral returns on dummy variables designed to capture the four stages of the business cycle. I found that though sectoral stock returns were closely related to the business cycle, they did not share …

Three Essays On The Economics Of Defense Contracting, Output And Income Inequality, Edward M. Decambra

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes both the economics of the defense contracting process and the impact of total dollar obligations on the economies of U.S. states. Using various econometric techniques, I will estimate relationships across individual contracts, state level output, and income inequality. I will achieve this primarily through the use of a dataset on individual contract obligations.

The first essay will catalog the distribution of contracts and isolate aspects of the process that contribute to contract dollar obligations. Accordingly, this study describes several characteristics about individual defense contracts, from 1966-2006: (i) the distribution of contract dollar obligations is extremely rightward skewed, …