Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Essays On Intrahousehold Allocation And The Family: Fertility, Child Education, And Nutrition, Alemayehu Azeze Ambel

Dissertations

Understanding the constraints that households face when making decisions on fertility, education, and health is beneficial for effective interventions aimed at enhancing investments in human capital, promoting gender equity, and reducing poverty. This dissertation consists of four essays that analyze the nature, performance, and determinants of fertility, child education, and nutritional status in a developing economy.

The first essay identifies peculiar constraints, including gender preference and income uncertainty that households face when making fertility and schooling choices. The underlying assumption in the theoretical analysis is that in the absence of formal risk and capital markets, households may revert to informal …

Estimating The Impact, Transmission Mechanism And Reaction Function Of Monetary Policy: A Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive (Favar) Approach, Dawit Legesse Senbet

Dissertations

This dissertation employs factor-augmented vector autoregressive (FAVAR) models to investigate the impact, transmission mechanism and reaction function of monetary policy. The recent development of augmenting dynamic factor analysis with the vector autoregressive (VAR) models, pioneered by Bernanke et al. (2005), has led to advances in monetary policy analysis. The new approach bases measurements of monetary policy on large data sets that approximate the true information set of policymakers. This is in contrast to low dimensional VAR models. The FAVAR model summarizes information from large data set by a few factors that are incorporated into VAR models.

The first essay investigates …

Three Essays On The Impacts Of Risk And Uncertainty On Foreign Direct Investment (Fdi) And Remittances Flows Into Developing Countries, Blen Solomon

Dissertations

This three-essay dissertation focuses on the two most important and most stable sources of finance to developing countries, namely Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and remittances. The first essay examines the roles of exchange rate uncertainty and political risk in determining FDI inflows into African economies. The past few decades have witnessed a surge of FDI inflows to developing regions. However, FDI inflows to Africa still remain relatively small and investor surveys show political risk and macroeconomic uncertainty to be strong deterrents of FDI inflows into Africa. In this essay, I use a sample of 12 African countries and employ Fixed …

Empirical Essays On Inflation And Economic Growth, Lezheng Liu

Dissertations

This dissertation collects three empirical essays on inflation and economic growth. The first essay examines the impact of inflation uncertainty on the level of inflation. Uncertainty is measured by the conditional variance of inflation, and inflation is modeled as a GARCH-in-mean process with a two-regime Markov-switching coefficient on uncertainty. Using a Bayesian estimator with the Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach, we find that the impacts of uncertainty on inflation are statistically significant and have different signs in different regimes for the U.S. postwar data. The regime switching nature of the inflation process can explain the contradictory theoretical predictions and empirical …