Macroeconomics Commons^™

Essays In Macroeconomics And Finance, Archil Dvalishvili

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1: (A Quantitative Analysis of Interest on Reserves and Reserve Requirements) - I construct a medium scale DSGE model with financial frictions both on the demand (entrepreneurs) and supply (banks) sides of credit to study the costs and benefits of fixed/time-varying minimum reserve requirements and interest paid by the Fed on reserves.The results can be summarized as follows: (1) An optimal time-varying minimum reserve requirement generates substantial welfare gain when compared with a fixed minimum reserve requirement when no interest is paid on reserves. (2) Paying interest on reserves is substantially welfare inferior to a policy with no interest …

Essays On Futures Market And Machine Learning, Jonathan J. Lopez Camara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1 - Big Data And Machine Learning To Predict Overnight Interest Rates. This paper is a brief introduction to the two main pieces I have elaborated as part of the dissertation. Here, I explain the reasons why I have done my research about predicting the overnight interest rates for Mexico and the United States using big data and machine learning models. I explain the connection between the two research papers, I define some basic concepts such as future contracts and the overnight funding rate for Mexico. There is a summary about the data I use, and the machine learning …

Essays On Inequality, Growth, And Economic Policy, Philipp E. Erfurth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that study inequality and regional economics in a historical and development context.

The first chapter examines regional inequality among Habsburg regions from the 19th century to today’s EU by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software to recreate historical regions in present-day projections. The findings suggests that regional disparities are markedly higher today than in the 19th century, despite rapid convergence in the past two decades. The study thus provides evidence of retrospective determinism in the study of the Habsburg economy and suggests that, although regional EU policy has been successful over the past two …

Essays On Spillover Effects Across U.S And China, Zhuo Xi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter1: With the rapid development and continuous advancement of economic globalization, the links between countries around the world have become increasingly tight. Among them, the United States, as the world's largest economy, its monetary policy is bound to cause significant spillover effects on other economies around the world. By constructing a Threshold SVAR model with monthly data from 1996 to 2019, this paper empirically investigates the spillover effects of US monetary policy on China's economy during different U.S policy regimes. The transmission mechanism of such effects has been tested through different channels including policy channel, trade channel, asset value channel …

Essays On Housing And Macroeconomics, Pablo Lara Hinojos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1: House Prices and Aggregate Markups: A VAR Approach

Based on the empirical results of Stroebel and Vavra (2019), who find that a local increase in house prices translates into higher local retail markups and prices, I investigate whether this relationship holds at the aggregate level. I first construct a quarterly aggregate markup series and find that house prices and aggregate markups have a positive relationship. This result emerges from a Vector Autoregression (VAR) system that includes the nominal interest rate, the inflation rate, aggregate house prices, aggregate markups, and real output. I use the Impulse Response Functions (IRFs) …

Macroeconomic Adjustments Of Global Convergence: Real Exchange Rate Response Of Asia-Pacific Growth, Kumarappan Annamalai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters.

Chapter 1 : PURCHASING POWER PARITY, REAL EXCHANGE RATE, PRICE LEVEL INDEX and HARROD-BALASSA-SAMUELSON EFFECT: LITERATURE SURVEY

In the light of the concepts explained in the introduction section, this chapter explores the seminal papers on the Purchasing Power Parity principle, the Real Exchange rate, and the Price Level Index, showing the evolution of PPP and the methodologies adopted in exploring the characteristics of PPP and the real exchange rates. Various characteristics might be stationarity or non-stationarity of the real exchange rates (RER), variance, correlation, half-life measures, linearity versus non-linearity, etc. Various methodologies adopted were …

Essays In Macroeconomic Policy, Meng-Ting Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that cover topics on macroeconomic policies.

Chapter 1 - Markups, Labor Share, and Wage Dispersion.

Increasing market power has an impact on labor market behavior. This paper argues that the decline in the aggregate wage after 1980 comes from both increasing aggregate product markup and decreasing aggregate labor markdown. Most of the decline is driven by the sharp decline in lower wage percentiles, which also contributes to the increasing wage dispersion. Further, both firms’ monopoly and monopsony power play important roles in explaining the decline in the aggregate labor share. I build a heterogeneous …

Financial Openness And Economic Growth, Doo Kyun Wang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An ongoing controversy in economics relates to the effect of financial openness on economic growth. Despite their longstanding nature, these questions are not easily resolved. Theoretically, capital market liberalization can lower the cost of capital. Given perfect international capital mobility, this can cause factor price equalization and finally accelerate economic growth. In contrast with the strong theoretical argument, empirical studies on the effect financial openness have on growth are still inconclusive.

Given the diverse perspective, the goal of this paper is to further investigate the role and effect of financial openness on economic growth in different time periods and at …

Essays In Development Macroeconomics, Miguel Orozco Vazquez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that cover topics on development macroeconomics.

Chapter 1 - Misallocation of Resources and Total Factor Productivity: Evidence from Mexico. This paper aims to measure the gross output loss due to misallocation of resources in the manufacturing and service sectors in Mexico during 2008-2018 and identify the inputs of production related to it. To do so, I use Mexican Economic Censuses and an extension of Hsieh and Klenow (2009). I also include resource misallocation computations using data processed with a Bayesian model for editing and imputing data to correct for measurement error (MEC data), which …

Essays In Monetary And Macroprudential Policies, Mikheil Dvalishvili

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1 Using a medium scale general equilibrium New Keynesian business cycle model with macroprudential policy and news shocks I study the effectiveness of various combinations of the monetary and macroprudential policies. I incorporate defaults both in the banking sector and households. The results show that out of the policy strategies considered the standard Taylor rule combined with the LTV requirement that reacts countercyclically to the deviation of house prices from the steady state yields higher welfare as compared with all the other strategies considered. Additionally, the standard Taylor rule combined with either of the countercyclical LTV requirements mitigates the …

Three Essays On Exchange Rate Models And Their Applications, Azza A. Mansour

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1: This chapter attempts to identify the determinant of exchange rate pass-through into producer and destination prices using highly disaggregated firm-level data of importers and exporters of the Egyptian economy from 2009 to 2013. The main findings assert the hypothesis of complete exchange rate pass-through into destination prices at the lowest level of significance for the average exporting firm that is also importing. Furthermore, the firm with the highest import intensity has a lower percentage of pass-through into destination prices, indicating that the marginal cost channel plays a more significant role in determining the speed of the exchange rate …

Essays On Economic Uncertainty And Housing Market In China, Humenghe Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that covers topics in macroeconomics.

Chapter 1. Literature Survey of China’s Housing Market and Macroeconomic Uncertainty is a survey of the literature on the history and development of China’s housing market, its unique characteristics, the driving forces behind rising housing prices, and the empirical interactions among housing market, economic uncertainty and the macroeconomy in China.

Chapter 2. The Spatial Correlation of Regional Housing Prices and Economic Uncertainty in China

Rapid real estate development and house price growth in China have garnered significant attention in academia and policy circles. Investigation into highly differentiated but interrelated …

Essays On Universal Basic Income, Nana Mukbaniani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a program in which individuals receive a regular sum of money, usually from the government. The transfer amount is thought to be unconditional of income and enough to cover all subsistence needs. Such a system is easy and cheap to administer because the government does not need to check the eligibility of each applicant. UBI programs are growing as more cities, states and countries (Stockton, California, Newark, New Jersey, Ontario, Canada, Kenya, Finland, Germany, Spain, China, etc) implement experiments of such programs. The idea of a UBI is gaining ground in the U.S.. One of …

Essays On Market Structure, Price-Setting, And Spillovers, Nicholas J. Bauer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 01: This paper explores the firm’s pricing-setting behavior through the lens of market structure and exchange rate pass-through. The basis for this chapter stems from a four-tiered nested constant elasticity of substitution demand function, where firms have non-negligible sector and subsector market shares. This model allows the firm to compete against firms within the same subsector, as well as against firms within other subsectors. From this model, I identify three propositions. First, a u-shaped price response in both sector and subsector market shares to an exchange rate movement. Second, a hump-shaped price response in subsector market share and a …

Fiscal And Monetary Policies And Stock Market, Ilhami Gunduz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters.

The first chapter analyzes the stock market transmission channel of the monetary policy of the Turkish economy not only at the aggregate but also at the sectoral level in a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. I adopt alternative variables as a policy instrument. When the spread is used as a policy instrument, I find that contractionary monetary policy has a significant negative effect on both output and the price level and it appreciates the Turkish Lira. In addition, tight monetary policy reduces both aggregate and sectoral market returns. Hence, the results suggest that policymakers …

Essays In Financial Economics And Applied Macroeconomics, Marius Mihai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that cover topics in finance and macroeconomics.

Chapter 1 - Do Credit Booms Predict U.S. Recessions?

This paper investigates the role of bank credit in predicting U.S. recessions since the 1960s in the context of a bivariate probit model. A set of results emerge. First, credit booms are shown to have strong positive effects in predicting declines in the business cycle at horizons ranging from six to nine months. Second, by isolating the effect of credit booms, I identify their contributions to recession probabilities which range between three and four percentage points at a …

Essays In Macroeconomics Of Emerging Markets, Miguel Acosta Henao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1. Law enforcement and the size of the informal sector.

I assemble new cross-country evidence showing that contrary to the standard view, the relationship between the size of the informal sector and tax rates is, at best, ambiguous. Law enforcement and informality also show no clear relation. Motivated by these findings, I augment a standard two-sector (formal and informal) small open economy model with endogenous law enforcement that depends on the size of the informal sector (measured by its assets) and government expenditure. I use a micro-dataset from Colombia to show that both taxes and law enforcement are necessary …

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 …

Essays On The Economic Consequences Of Capital Controls, Richard J. Nugent Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters. In Chapter One, we review the literature on the economic consequences of capital controls. Capital controls are advocated as second-best policy in the presence of a pecuniary externality. Restricting capital inflows as a prudential tool during economic booms may distort the efficient allocation of capital but it invokes precautionary saving behavior so that agents do not overborrow. The financial crises that are fueled by capital market distortions can be mitigated by the use of prudential capital controls, heightened during the boom and released during the bust. The empirical evidence on capital controls has revealed …

Essays On New Keynesian Term Premium Model With Financial Risks, Weiguo Fu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the modeling of U.S. Treasury (UST) yield curve term premia under the New Keynesian (NK) framework. Loosely speaking, term premium is the difference between a government bond’s yield for a specific tenor and the average of the expected short rates up to that tenor. The dissertation is divided into three chapters. The first chapter proposes a New Keynesianism-based macro-finance model estimated by a one-step full information maximum likelihood (FIML) method. The second chapter shows that the one-step FIML method may produce estimation biases, which result in biased expected short rates and term premia. The chapter then presents …

Empirical Analysis Of China’S Exchange Rate And Macroeconomic Policy, Jia Ji

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the effects of exchange rate and macroeconomic policy in China. It consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 explores the dynamics of monetary transmission mechanism. As China’s domestic financial markets deepen and develop further toward a market-based system, the country’s monetary policy transmission should continue to improve in the sense that the policy instrument’s influence on economic conditions increases in magnitude and stabilized across time. Using a short-term key interest rate as a standard monetary policy tool and time-varying parameter techniques, this study empirically demonstrates that China’s monetary policy framework is in the midst of transitioning to a …

Shapes And Transitions Of The Interest Rate Term Structure, Biwei Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I analyze different shapes of Treasury yield curves in order to better reflect and predict the U.S. economy. Since the late 1980s, macroeconomists have found that the slope of the yield curve predicts economic activity such as inflation, output growth, and recessions, but they have not fully examined the links between various shapes of yield curve and the macroeconomy. To fill the gap, I classify yield curve shapes with the U.S. Treasury yield data, detect the shape patterns over the business cycles, and map these shapes onto corresponding inflation and production states. Although the downward-sloping yield curve reliably predicts U.S. …

Essays In New Keynesian Monetary Policy, Tzu-Hao Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation consists of three Chapters. I consider New Keynesian models which involve tradeoffs between output gap and inflation variances. Such policy strategy is often referred to as flexible inflation targeting rules (e.g., Lars Svensson 2011, pp.1238-95). Taylor rules, in general, have the symbolic expression 𝑖_t=𝜑_x𝑥_t+𝜑_𝜋𝜋_t+𝜑_g𝑔_t, where 𝑖_t is the nominal interest rate at period t, 𝑥_t is the target variable output gap at period t, 𝜋_t is the target variable inflation rate at period t, 𝑔_t is realized shock …

Analyzing Housing Demand And Its Role In The U.S. Economy, Irina Ayzenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the most recent economic downturn, caused by the burst of the housing bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis, the housing market took a direct hit: mortgage default rates were over 10 percent, housing prices fell 35 percent from 2005 to 2009, more than 5 million homes were foreclosed since 2008, and interest rates hit rock-bottom. In response, the U.S. Federal Reserve adopted aggressive expansionary monetary policies to get the economy back on track, some of which are in effect today. In order to really understand the state and direction of the U.S. economy today, we need to better understand …

Bayesian State Space Representation Model: Applications To Macroeconomics And International Finance, Hiroshi Morita

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation develops three new econometric models using Bayesian state space representation model in order to apply to macroeconomics and international finance. It consists of 3 chapters. Chapter 1 develops a Markov mixture model of macroeconomic fundamentals to analyze the short-run dynamics of foreign exchange rates. In our model, foreign exchange rates are simultaneously determined by three parities: the interest rate parity, the inflation rate parity, and the equity return rate parity. Using four exchange rates: the U.S. dollar price of the British pound, the German mark, the Japanese yen, and the Canadian dollar, the findings are: (1) Our model …

Essays On Inequality And Macroeconomic Stability, Thomas Hauner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters. . .

Chapter 1: Aggregate Wealth and Its Distribution as Determinants of Financial Crises: Panel Evidence This essay investigates the relationship between wealth inequality and financial crises across a panel of nine advanced economies over the past 100 years. While substantiation of a role for income inequality is ambiguous in the literature, evidence is presented suggesting a unique capacity for the accumulation of assets to increase the likelihood of a future financial crisis episode. Testing long-run panel data with a reduced form, two-way fixed effects model, estimates suggest that increasing wealth inequality, in an …

Essays On The Impact Of Exchange Rate Movements On Stock Return And Country Output, Junnan Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exchange rate movements are widely believed to be a major source of uncertainty at both micro- and macro-economic levels. At the microeconomic level, corporate managers controlling risk and investors seeking to hedge their portfolios are both obviously interested in estimates of a firm’s exchange rate exposure ̶ i.e., how much of the value of a firm will be affected by exchange rate movements. At the macroeconomic level, a currency appreciation may have a contractionary effect on a country's output.

Chapter 1 tests whether the launch of the euro around 1999 significantly reduced stock market volatility and exchange rate risk exposure …

Surplus Consumption, Habit Utility And Moody Investors, Jun Lou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The thesis examines a blend of Asset Pricing topics: joint stock-bond pricing, consumption-based asset pricing puzzles, time variation in risk preference, among others. In chapter one, I first review the literature on respective topics in search of a consolidated framework of resolution. I then propose one, a consumption-based affine model that jointly prices bond and stock in closed form. The tractable feature of the price solutions remains standard as in affine termstructure of interest rates, but presents novelty for the stock prices. In chapter two, I discuss the GMM based procedures for model estimation. In chapter three, I interpret the …

Three Essays On The European Sovereign Debt Crisis With A Special Focus On Greece, Flora Leventi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters where I examine several aspects of the European sovereign debt crisis. The first chapter focuses on systemic risk. Following the financial crisis of 2007-08, both in academic as well as policy circles, much of the research has focused toward the systemic importance of financial institutions. Parallel to that research, but to somewhat lesser extent, there have been improvements in our understanding of how risk is transmitted from the financial system to the real economy. This chapter investigates a related yet distinct manifestation of systemic risk, namely systemic sovereign risk. Using data on sovereign credit …

Essays On The Law Of One Price In Financial Markets And The Recent Financial Crisis, Igor Sorkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Essay 1: The theory of the Law of One Price (LOOP) is one of the most important theories in International Economics. I use financial markets to revisit the validity of the LOOP in the short run, and then extend the analysis into the long-run to examine whether events such as the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 can lead to the failure of the LOOP or worsen deviations from it. Using the data on Canadian companies cross-listed on the New York Stock Exchange, I find strong support that the LOOP holds in a cross-sectional framework despite the fact that the sample includes …