Download or read book Empirical Essays on Expectations and Uncertainty in Macroeconomics written by Angela Martina Fuest and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Empirical Essays on Uncertainty and Economic Behavior written by Paul Jones and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation looks at the new and growing field of macroeconomic uncertainty. It consists of three empirical essays on different measures of macroeconomic uncertainty and how uncertainty affects macroeconomic behavior. The first essay uses a new uncertainty index from Baker et al. (2012). We evaluate the time-varying correlation between macroeconomic uncertainty, inflation, and output. Estimation results from a multivariate DCC-GARCH model reveal that the sign of the correlation between macroeconomic uncertainty and inflation changed from negative to positive during the late 1990s, whereas the correlation between uncertainty and output is consistently negative. In the second essay, we propose domestic uncertainty shocks may serve as a channel through which business cycles are transmitted internationally. To quantify uncertainty, we use two measures from the current literature and estimate structural vector autoregressions to evaluate the effects U.S. uncertainty shocks have on the Japanese and British economies. Our results suggest U.S. uncertainty shocks have international effects consistent with a demand shock in the context of an open-economy IS/LM model with sticky prices. For the final essay we estimate a number of macroeconomic variables as logistic smooth transition autoregressive (LSTAR) processes with uncertainty as the transition variable. Nonlinear estimation allows us to answer several interesting questions left unanswered by a linear model. For a number of important macroeconomic variables, we show (i) a positive shock to uncertainty has a greater effect than a negative shock, and (ii) the effect of the uncertainty shock is highly dependent on the state of the economy. Hence, the usual linear estimates concerning the consequences of uncertainty are underestimated in circumstances such as the recent financial crisis.

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Macroeconomics written by Julian Felix Ludwig and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines how expectations are formed and how they interact with economic activities. Beliefs about economic outcomes vary with timing and accuracy of information, which have important implications for macroeconomic dynamics. The importance of expectations has long been emphasized in rational expectations (RE) models (see e.g. Lucas 1972, 1976; Kydland and Prescott 1982), and diffusion of information has been modeled in many ways (see e.g. Beaudry and Portier 2004, 2006; Mankiw and Reis 2002; Woodford 2003; Sims 2003). My work builds on this literature and aims to improve the understanding of information structure, formation of beliefs, and decision-making, and how they contribute to macro business cycles. In the first chapter, I point out how identification of full information rational expectations (FIRE) models suffers from Manski's (1993) reflection problem. I extend the standard rational expectations (RE) model to allow for a more general information structure and introduce a new framework to identify the generalized model with forecaster data. Identification is no longer subject to the reflection problem when two changes are made to the information structure: the addition of news shocks and imperfect information. News shocks provide additional variation in expectations about the future. Imperfect information provides changes in beliefs about past states, through which the feedback between expectations and decisions goes only in one direction. Expectations data are consistent with both. An application to Greenbook forecasts illustrates the importance of both news shocks and learning about the past. When I apply this framework to a Blanchard and Quah (1989) decomposition, I reach qualitatively new results. For example, expansionary supply shocks decrease unemployment. Supply shocks are also particularly subject to both news and information rigidities, so relaxing the information structure is key to correctly identifying these shocks. In the second chapter, I discover how both good and bad news shocks coincide with higher uncertainty on impact. This new stylized fact is robust to different empirical models of the news shocks literature and different proxies for U.S. macro uncertainty. The new stylized fact has implications in three fields. First, bad news shocks produce the dynamics discovered in the uncertainty literature: spikes in uncertainty are followed by drops in output. I show that there is indeed some overlap between bad news and uncertainty shocks, as the effect of an uncertainty shock gets weaker when controlling for bad news shocks. Second, I show that the close relationship between news shocks and uncertainty seems to be also responsible for the close relationship between quarterly stock returns and stock market volatility - a proxy for uncertainty. This contributes to the finance literature that works on this relationship. Third, introducing a non-linear empirical model, I find additional asymmetries in the responses to news shocks due to the asymmetric response of uncertainty. This contributes directly to the news shocks literature. An important conclusion of chapters one and two is that economic shocks vary with availability of information. The third chapter deals with such heterogeneity. I relax the assumption that economic shocks of the same type are homogeneous, respectively, always have the same effect. Instead, I argue that economists identify a shock that consists of a variety of heterogeneous components. For example, a technology shock is the sum of all disaggregate technology shocks, from innovations in marketing up to inventions in the manufacturing process, which all have different effects on the economy. I discuss how standard identification methods can identify the shocks of interest despite this heterogeneity. I find that the weights on the shock components depend on the identification strategy so that different identification strategies produce different effects. This could explain why different macro papers often identify different responses to the same shock, in the same country, and over the same time period

Download or read book Essays on Model Uncertainty in Macroeconomics written by Mingjun Zhao and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: My dissertation grapples with the issues of model uncertainty in macroeconomics, and analyzes its consequences for monetary policy. It consists of three essays. In the first essay (Chapter 1), "Monetary Policy under Misspecified Expectations", I examine policy choices for the central bank that faces uncertainty about the process of expectation formation by economic agents. The economy contains both "rule-of-thumb" agents who base their expectations on recent observations and agents who have rational expectations. The central bank is uncertain about the fraction of the rule-of-thumb agents. This uncertainty concern enables me to partially rationalize the over cautious policy stance of the Fed: empirically observed policy in the past two decades involves much weaker responses than optimal policies derived from various micro-founded models. It is well understood that when the economy is more forward-looking, the central bank displays more aggressive responses to inflation and output. But the uncertainty-averse central bank evaluates policies by the performance in the worst case. In my economy this has a high fraction of agents that are backward-looking. The best policy the central bank chooses thus involves moderate responses. That is to say, this minimax policy moves closer toward actual less responsive policy. In the second essay (Chapter 2), "Phillips Curve Uncertainty and Monetary Policy", I investigate the effect of model uncertainty on policy choices employing a more general approach, which nests the minimax and Bayesian approaches as limiting cases. The central bank is uncertain about whether the economy has a sticky price Phillips curve or a sticky information Phillips curve. I argue that how the central bank chooses a policy depends both on its perception of uncertainty environment and on its attitude towards uncertainty. I find that as the central bank either becomes more uncertainty-averse or considers sticky information more plausible, the response to inflation decreases and to output increases. The third essay (Chapter 3) is entitled "Optimal Simple Rules in RE Models with Risk Sensitive Preferences". This paper provides a useful method to solve optimal simple rules under risk sensitive preference in macro models with forward looking behavior. An application to a new Keynesian model with lagged dynamics is offered and risk sensitive preference is found to amplify policy responses.

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Economics written by Rasmus Pank Roulund and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first chapter is co-authored with Nicolás Aragón and examines how participant and market confidence affect the outcomes in an experimental asset market where the fundamental value is known by all participants. Such a market should, in theory, clear at the expected value in each period. However, the literature has shown that bubbles often occur in these markets. We measure the confidence of each participant by asking them to forecast the one-period-ahead price as a discrete probability mass distribution. We find that confidence not only affects price-formation in markets, but is important in explaining the dynamics of bubbles. Moreover, as traders’ confidence grows, they become increasingly more optimistic, thus increasing the likelihood of price bubbles. The second chapter also deals with expectations and uncertainty, but from a different angle. It asks how increased uncertainty affects economic demand in a particular sector, using a discrete-choice demand framework. To investigate this issue I examine empirically to what extent varying uncertainty affects the consumer demand for flight traffic using us micro demand data. I find that the elasticity of uncertainty on demand is economically and statistically significant. The third chapter presents a more practical side to the issue examined in the first chapter. It describes how to elicit participants’ expectations in an economic experiment. The methodology is based on Harrison et al. (2017). The tool makes it easier for participants in economic experiments to forecast the movements of a key variable as discrete values using a discrete probability mass distribution that can be “drawn” on a virtual canvas using the mouse. The module I wrote is general enough that it can be included in other economic experiments.

Download or read book Uncertainty and Expectations in Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Uncertainty Expectations and Asset Price Dynamics written by Fredj Jawadi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in honor of Emeritus Professor Georges Prat (University of Paris Nanterre, France), this book includes contributions from eminent authors on a range of topics that are of interest to researchers and graduates, as well as investors and portfolio managers. The topics discussed include the effects of information and transaction costs on informational and allocative market efficiency, bubbles and stock price dynamics, paradox of rational expectations and the principle of limited information, uncertainty and expectation hypotheses, oil price dynamics, and nonlinearity in asset price dynamics.

Download or read book Empirical Macroeconomics and Statistical Uncertainty written by Mateusz Pipień and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses one of the most important research activities in empirical macroeconomics. It provides a course of advanced but intuitive methods and tools enabling the spatial and temporal disaggregation of basic macroeconomic variables and the assessment of the statistical uncertainty of the outcomes of disaggregation. The empirical analysis focuses mainly on GDP and its growth in the context of Poland. However, all of the methods discussed can be easily applied to other countries. The approach used in the book views spatial and temporal disaggregation as a special case of the estimation of missing observations (a topic on missing data analysis). The book presents an econometric course of models of Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equations (SURE). The main advantage of using the SURE specification is to tackle the presented research problem so that it allows for the heterogeneity of the parameters describing relations between macroeconomic indicators. The book contains model specification, as well as descriptions of stochastic assumptions and resulting procedures of estimation and testing. The method also addresses uncertainty in the estimates produced. All of the necessary tests and assumptions are presented in detail. The results are designed to serve as a source of invaluable information making regional analyses more convenient and – more importantly – comparable. It will create a solid basis for making conclusions and recommendations concerning regional economic policy in Poland, particularly regarding the assessment of the economic situation. This is essential reading for academics, researchers, and economists with regional analysis as their field of expertise, as well as central bankers and policymakers.

Download or read book Surveys in the Economics of Uncertainty written by John Denis Hey and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1989 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Information Frictions and the Macroeconomy written by Andras Komaromi and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is a compilation of three essays on the role of information frictions in macroeconomics. The first essay contributes to the literature on the impact of uncertainty on the business cycle. The cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level outcomes, such as sales growth or stock returns, is markedly countercyclical. Recent papers have framed this fact as evidence that exogenous "uncertainty shocks" are important drivers of business cycles. This paper provides empirical evidence that the co-movement of various dispersion measures with the business cycle is better understood as the economy's endogenous response to traditional first moment shocks - dispersion is the effect, not the cause. It then develops a theoretical model that links the cross-sectional dispersion of micro-level outcomes to the aggregate state of the economy. The mechanism is based on time-varying rational inattention. In bad times, firms pay more attention to idiosyncratic shocks hitting their business environment. More precise micro- level information about the underlying heterogeneity leads to higher dispersion in realized outcomes. In line with the empirical findings, the model generates countercyclical dispersion without relying on exogenous second moment (uncertainty) shocks. The second essay uses survey expectations to assess the microfoundations of an important class of macroeconomic models. Many theoretical macro models try to explain the pervasive nominal and real stickiness in the data by assuming rational decision-making under imperfect information. The behavior of consensus (average) forecasts is consistent with the predictions of these models, which can be seen as supportive empirical evidence for the models' microfoundations (Coibion and Gorodnichenko, 2012). This paper demonstrates, however, that the individual-level data underlying the consensus forecasts are at odds with this interpretation. In particular, I document that individual expectations in the Survey of Professional Forecasters do not pass a very weak test of rational expectations: current forecast revisions are strong predictors of subsequent forecast errors. Information frictions alone cannot explain this pattern. I go on to propose a simple modification of the noisy information framework that allows for a particular form of non-rational expectations: agents may incorrectly weight new information against their prior. I show that this parsimonious model can match the survey data along several dimensions. Using the structure of the model, I estimate the direction and size of inefficiencies in the expectations formation process. I find that in most cases agents put too much weight on their private information, which can be interpreted as overconfidence in the precision of private information. I also show that there is substantial heterogeneity across agents in the deviation from rational expectations, and I relate these differences to observable characteristics. Finally, I discuss potential interpretations of my empirical results and their implications for macroeconomic theory. The third essay explores the potential trade-off between competition and systemic stability in financial intermediation. Why do banks feel compelled to operate with such high leverage despite the risks this poses? Using a simple model, I argue that the degree of competition goes a long way in explaining capital structure decisions. On the one hand, information frictions (adverse selection) render debt a cheaper form of financing than equity. On the other hand, more reliance on debt increases the probability of bankruptcy, which results in the loss of the bank's charter value. The degree of competition affects charter values, and hence changes the way banks balance between these two forces. A panel analysis of European banks' capital structure around the introduction of the euro reveals statistically and economically significant effects consistent with this hypothesis. Banks, in particular smaller banks, decreased their equity ratios after entering the currency area. Complementary evidence suggests that this effect can be attributed to increased competitive pressures boosted by the euro.

Download or read book Handbook of Economic Expectations written by Ruediger Bachmann and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2022-11-04 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handbook of Economic Expectations discusses the state-of-the-art in the collection, study and use of expectations data in economics, including the modelling of expectations formation and updating, as well as open questions and directions for future research. The book spans a broad range of fields, approaches and applications using data on subjective expectations that allows us to make progress on fundamental questions around the formation and updating of expectations by economic agents and their information sets. The information included will help us study heterogeneity and potential biases in expectations and analyze impacts on behavior and decision-making under uncertainty. Combines information about the creation of economic expectations and their theories, applications and likely futures Provides a comprehensive summary of economics expectations literature Explores empirical and theoretical dimensions of expectations and their relevance to a wide array of subfields in economics

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Macroeconomics written by Gwangmin Kim and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is going to empirically study household inflation expectations and inflation. Inflation expectations and inflation play a central role in economic dynamics. For example, when households expect future price increases, households will try to purchase goods now than later at higher prices which is eventually going to push prices even higher. Chapter 1 contributes to the literature on inflation expectations by showing a channel that can significantly bias the central banks' aggregate inflation expectations measures. This chapter is joint work with Carola Binder. We show that when inflation expectations surveys rely on repeat survey participants, survey participation itself may affect future responses. Because the central bank's survey asks about future prices and inflation, it prompts information acquisition between survey waves for survey respondents. These "Learning-through-Survey" effects are particularly large for household inflation expectations. For example, after participating twelve consecutive times in the SCE, respondents end up with a 2.6 percentage point lower inflation forecast and 34% lower inflation uncertainty on average than in the first interview, with most of the decline happening in the first two months of participation. Consequently, repeat participants may be more informed, and not be representative of the broader population of the economy. Chapter 2 estimates three components of household inflation expectations of the SCE using a dynamic factor model: Common, Learning, and Long-run factor. Using the estimated common inflation expectation factor shared by all survey participants, I recover the household inflation expectations less the learning effect of the SCE without discarding repeat survey participants' data which could have been wasteful otherwise. It successfully corrects for the bias due to the learning effects of repeat survey participants and is significantly less noisy than the raw data. In addition, the estimated learning factor and long-run factor of inflation expectations suggest that inflation expectations of households are largely influenced by news coverage on inflation and oil prices. Finally, Chapter 3 studies the product life cycle effects on prices and inflation inequality in the U.S. The annual inflation rate of lower-income households has been higher than that of higher-income households in general, a finding termed in extensive literature as "inflation inequality." Using barcode-level retail sales data and household spending data in the U.S, I show that the product life cycle channel can account for a significant portion of this inflation inequality among households. The prices of new products are initially high but steadily decrease after then as it goes out of fashion. Because rich households tend to be early adopters preferring new goods to old goods, those rich early adopters experience a sharp price decrease or lower inflation than poor late-adopters who buy goods when the price decreasing phase has stopped or got less steep

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Macroeconomics written by Scott Ross Baker and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains four distinct essays in two broad areas of empirical macroeconomics. The first area analyzes two drivers of household behavior during the great recession as relates to consumption choices and job search when unemployed. The second area covers the measurement and impact of economic and policy uncertainty on economic outcomes.

Download or read book Rethinking Expectations written by Roman Frydman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book originated from a 2010 conference marking the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the landmark "Phelps volume," Microeconomic Foundations of Employment and Inflation Theory, a book that is often credited with pioneering the currently dominant approach to macroeconomic analysis. However, in their provocative introductory essay, Roman Frydman and Edmund Phelps argue that the vast majority of macroeconomic and finance models developed over the last four decades derailed, rather than built on, the Phelps volume's "microfoundations" approach. Whereas the contributors to the 1970 volume recognized the fundamental importance of according market participants' expectations an autonomous role, contemporary models rely on the rational expectations hypothesis (REH), which rules out such a role by design. The financial crisis that began in 2007, preceded by a spectacular boom and bust in asset prices that REH models implied could never happen, has spurred a quest for fresh approaches to macroeconomic analysis. While the alternatives to REH presented in Rethinking Expectations differ from the approach taken in the original Phelps volume, they are notable for returning to its major theme: understanding aggregate outcomes requires according expectations an autonomous role. In the introductory essay, Frydman and Phelps interpret the various efforts to reconstruct the field--some of which promise to chart its direction for decades to come. The contributors include Philippe Aghion, Sheila Dow, George W. Evans, Roger E. A. Farmer, Roman Frydman, Michael D. Goldberg, Roger Guesnerie, Seppo Honkapohja, Katarina Juselius, Enisse Kharroubi, Blake LeBaron, Edmund S. Phelps, John B. Taylor, Michael Woodford, and Gylfi Zoega.

Download or read book Essay on Macroeconomics and Expectations written by Giovanni Nicolò and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation focuses on the interactions between the conduct of U.S. monetary policy and the expectations formed by households, firms and public institutions about the state of economy. The first two chapters develop new methods that I use in the subsequent chapters to study how expectations formed by economic agents about future economic conditions affect a given economy. The second chapter considers and extends the work in Farmer (2012a) to explain U.S. post-war data, and shows that it outperforms conventional economic theories due to its ability to account for persistent movements in the data. The last chapter explores how the effectiveness of monetary policy changed in the U.S. post-war period, and I provide evidence that since the early 1980's the monetary authority implemented policies that reduced economic uncertainty deriving from unforeseen changes in the expectations about future inflation.

Download or read book Risk and Uncertainty in Economics written by David G. Dickinson and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1994 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What impact do random events have on individuals? How do they adapt to living in an uncertain stochastic environment? This work pays tribute to the contribution of James L. Ford to our understanding of these themes.

Download or read book Risk Uncertainty and Profit written by Frank H. Knight and published by Cosimo, Inc.. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timeless classic of economic theory that remains fascinating and pertinent today, this is Frank Knight's famous explanation of why perfect competition cannot eliminate profits, the important differences between "risk" and "uncertainty," and the vital role of the entrepreneur in profitmaking. Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, is a distinct pleasure to read. FRANK H. KNIGHT (1885-1972) is considered by some the greatest American scholar of economics of the 20th century. An economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, he was one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, which influenced Milton Friedman and George Stigler.