Download or read book Essays on Economic Uncertainty and Macro finance written by Yang Liu and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies topics in macro-finance with a focus on economic uncertainty. The first chapter (Government Debt and Risk Premia) studies the implications of government debt for asset prices. I document a set of new facts that government debt is related to risk premia in various asset markets.First, the debt-to-GDP ratio positively predicts excess stock returns. The forecast power is compelling, and it outperforms many popular predictors. Second, higher debt-to-GDP ratio is correlated with higher credit risk premia in both corporate bond excess returns and yield spreads. Third, higher debt-to-GDP ratio is associated with lower real risk-free rate. Fourth, higher debt-to-GDP ratio predicts lower average returns on government debt. Expected return variation contributes to a sizable amount of the volatility of the debt-to-GDP ratio. Fifth, debt-to-GDP ratio positively comoves with fiscal policy uncertainty. Fiscal uncertainty also has direct effects on the asset prices consistent with the effect of debt-to-GDP ratio. I rationalize these empirical findings in a general equilibrium model featuring recursive preferences, endogenous growth, and time-varying fiscal uncertainty. In the model, the tax risk premium is sizable and its time variation is driven by fiscal uncertainty. Furthermore, the model generates an endogenous positive relationship between the debt-to-GDP ratio and fiscal uncertainty: fiscal uncertainty increases debt valuation through discount rate channel whereas higher debt conversely raises uncertainty in future fiscal consolidations. In the second chapter (Volatility Risk Pass-Through), we estimate and explain the international transmission of output volatility shocks to both currencies and international quantity dynamics. We produce novel empirical evidence on the relevance of output volatility (vol) shocks for both currency and international quantity dynamics. Focusing on G-17 countries, we document several facts: (1) consumption and output vols are imperfectly correlated within countries; (2) across countries, consumption vol is more correlated than output vol; (3) the pass-through of relative output vol shocks onto relative consumption vol is moderate, especially if the uncertainty shocks originate from small countries; and (4) consumption differentials vol and exchange rate vol are disconnected, in contrast to the perfect correlation implied by a model of perfect risk-sharing with time-additive preferences. We rationalize these findings in a frictionless model with multiple goods and recursive preferences featuring a novel-and-rich risk-sharing of vol shocks. The third chapter (Volatility, Intermediaries, and Exchange Rates) studies how financial market volatility drives exchange rates through the risk management practice of financial intermediaries. We build a model in which the major participants in the international financial market are levered intermediaries subject to Value-at-Risk constraints. Higher portfolio volatility translates into tighter funding conditions and increased marginal value of wealth. Thus, foreign currency is expected to appreciate. Our model can resolve the Backus-Smith puzzle, the forward premium puzzle, and the exchange rate volatility puzzle quantitatively. Our empirical test verifies two implications of the model that both financial market volatility and funding condition measurement have predictive power on exchange rates.

Download or read book Essays on Risk and Uncertainty in Economics and Finance written by Jorge Mario Uribe Gil and published by Ed. Universidad de Cantabria. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book adds to the resolution of two problems in finance and economics: i) what is macro-financial uncertainty? : How to measure it? How is it different from risk? How important is it for the financial markets? And ii) what sort of asymmetries underlie financial risk and uncertainty propagation across the global financial markets? That is, how risk and uncertainty change according to factors such as market states or market participants. In Chapter 2, which is entitled “Momentum Uncertainties”, the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and the abnormal returns of a momentum trading strategy in the stock market is studies. We show that high levels of uncertainty in the economy impact negatively and significantly the returns of a portfolio of stocks that consist of buying past winners and selling past losers. High uncertainty reduces below zero the abnormal returns of momentum, extinguishes the Sharpe ratio of the momentum strategy, while increases the probability of momentum crashes both by increasing the skewness and the kurtosis of the momentum return distribution. Uncertainty acts as an economic regime that underlies abrupt changes over time of the returns generated by momentum strategies. In Chapter 3, “Measuring Uncertainty in the Stock Market”, a new index for measuring stock market uncertainty on a daily basis is proposed. The index considers the inherent differentiation between uncertainty and the common variations between the series. The second contribution of chapter 3 is to show how this financial uncertainty index can also serve as an indicator of macroeconomic uncertainty. Finally, the dynamic relationship between uncertainty and the series of consumption, interest rates, production and stock market prices, among others, is analized. In chapter 4: “Uncertainty, Systemic Shocks and the Global Banking Sector: Has the Crisis Modified their Relationship?” we explore the stability of systemic risk and uncertainty propagation among financial institutions in the global economy, and show that it has remained stable over the last decade. Additionally, a new simple tool for measuring the resilience of financial institutions to these systemic shocks is provided. We examine the characteristics and stability of systemic risk and uncertainty, in relation to the dynamics of the banking sector stock returns. This sort of evidence is supportive of past claims, made in the field of macroeconomics, which hold that during the global financial crisis the financial system may have faced stronger versions of traditional shocks rather than a new type of shock. In chapter 5, “Currency downside risk, liquidity, and financial stability”, downside risk propagation across global currency markets and the ways in which it is related to liquidity is analyzed. Two primary contributions to the literature follow. First, tail-spillovers between currencies in the global FX market are estimated. This index is easy to build and does not require intraday data, which constitutes an important advantage. Second, we show that turnover is related to risk spillovers in global currency markets. Chapter 6 is entitled “Spillovers from the United States to Latin American and G7 Stock Markets: A VAR-Quantile Analysis”. This chapter contributes to the studies of contagion, market integration and cross-border spillovers during both regular and crisis episodes by carrying out a multivariate quantile analysis. It focuses on Latin American stock markets, which have been characterized by a highly positive dynamic in recent decades, in terms of market capitalization and liquidity ratios, after a far-reaching process of market liberalization and reforms to pension funds across the continent during the 80s and 90s. We document smaller dependences between the LA markets and the US market than those between the US and the developed economies, especially in the highest and lowest quantiles.

Download or read book Essays in Macro Finance and Monetary Economics written by Modeste Yirbèhogré Somé and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Macro finance International Economics and Macro econometrics written by Laurent Kemoe and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis brings new evidence on different strands of the literature in macro-finance, international economics and macroeconometrics. The first two chapters combine both theoretical models and empirical techniques to deepen the analysis of important economic phenomena such as the effects of economic policy uncertainty on financial markets, and convergence between emerging market economies and advanced economies on these markets. The third chapter of the thesis, which is co-authored with Hafedh Bouakez, contributes to the literature on the identification of news shocks about future productivity. In the first chapter, I study the effect of monetary and fiscal policy uncertainty on nominal U.S. government bond yields and premiums. I use a New-Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model featuring recursive preferences, and both real and nominal rigidities. Policy uncertainty in the DSGE model is defined as a mean-preserving spread of the policy shock distributions. My results show that: (i) When the economy is subject to unpredictable shocks to the volatility of policy instruments, the level of the median yield curve is lower, its slope increases and risk premiums decrease relative to an economy with no stochastic volatility. This negative effect on the level of yields and premiums is due to the asymmetric impact of positive versus negative shocks; (ii) A typical policy risk shock increases yields at all maturities. This is because the fall in yields triggered by higher demand for bonds by households, in order to hedge against higher predicted consumption volatility, is outweighed by the increase in yields due to higher inflation risk premiums. Finally, I use several empirical measures economic policy uncertainty in a structural VAR model to show that the above effects of policy risk shocks on yields are consistent empirical evidence. Chapter 2 looks at the market for government bonds in 12 advanced economies and 8 emerging market economies, during the period 1999-2012, and consider the question of whether or not there has been any convergence of risk between emerging market and advanced economies. I distinguish between default risk and other types of risk, such as inflation, liquidity and exchange rate risk. I make the theoretical case that forward risk premium differentials can be used to distinguish default risk and other risks. I then construct forward risk premium differentials and use these to make the empirical case that there has been little convergence associated with the other types of risk. I also show that differences in countries' macroeconomic fundamentals and political risk play an important role in explaining the large "non-default" risk differentials observed between emerging and advanced economies. Chapter 3 proposes a novel strategy to identify anticipated and unanticipated technology shocks, which leads to results that are consistent with the predictions of conventional new-Keynesian models. It shows that the failure of many empirical studies to generate consistent responses to these shocks is due to impurities in the available TFP series, which lead to an incorrect identification of unanticipated technology shocks---whose estimated effects are inconsistent with the interpretation of these disturbances as supply shocks. This, in turn, contaminates the identification of news shocks. My co-author, Hafedh Bouakez, and I propose an agnostic identification strategy that allows TFP to be affected by both technological and non-technological shocks, and identifies unanticipated technology shocks via sign restrictions on the response of inflation. The results show that the effects of both surprise TFP shocks and news shocks are generally consistent with the predictions of standard new-Keynesian models. In particular, the inflation puzzle documented in previous studies vanishes under the novel empirical strategy.

Download or read book Economic Uncertainty Instabilities And Asset Bubbles Selected Essays written by Anastasios G Malliaris and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2005-10-03 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The compendium of papers in this volume focuses on aspects of economic uncertainty, financial instabilities and asset bubbles.Economic uncertainty is modeled in continuous time using the mathematical techniques of stochastic calculus. A detailed treatment of important topics is provided, including the existence and uniqueness of asymptotic economic growth, the modeling of inflation and interest rates, the decomposition of inflation and its volatility, and the extension of the quantity theory of money to allow for randomness.The reader is also introduced to the methods of chaotic dynamics, and this methodology is applied to asset pricing, the European equity markets, and the multi-fractality in foreign currency markets.Since the techniques of stochastic calculus and chaotic dynamics do not readily accommodate the presence of stochastic bubbles, several papers discuss in depth the presence of financial bubbles in asset prices, and econometric work is performed to link such bubbles to monetary policy.Finally, since bubbles often burst rather than deflate slowly, the last section of the book studies the crash of October 1987 as well as other crashes of national equity markets due to the Persian gulf crisis.

Download or read book Essays on Economic Uncertainty and Financial Markets written by Semih Kerestecioglu 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 Three Essays on Macro finance Banking and Monetary Policy written by Russell H. Rollow and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In my first chapter, I study how the dollar funding fragility of non-US banks amplifies cyclical patterns in their appetite for credit risk. Global banks outside of the United States finance a significant portion of their dollar-denominated lending with uninsured wholesale dollar funding, the price of which rises with the perceived riskiness of the bank. Using data from the syndicated lending market, I examine the risk appetite of non-US global banks when a broad appreciation of the US dollar expands portfolio tail risk and activates value-at-risk constraints. By orthogonalizing errors in professional forecasts of the broad dollar index to other macroeconomic indicators, I show that following such a dollar appreciation, global banks with a heavy dependence on wholesale dollar funding contract cross-border dollar lending to firms with high credit risk, as measured with loan-specific spreads and borrower-specific characteristics. Based on this evidence, I argue that instability in non-US bank funding structures amplifies cyclical patterns in their appetite for credit risk.In my second chapter, I explore how traditional modeling techniques can be applied to produce density forecasts of interest rates. As spikes in economic uncertainty have grown in prevalence, the projection of financial data has become a more arduous task, which has sharpened the focus of investors and policymakers on forecast risk. By integrating a dynamic factor model into a Bayesian framework, I develop a density forecasting model that projects the predictive density of interest rates. Unlike point forecasts, density forecasts produce probability estimates for the full distribution of potential future outcomes of interest rates, as opposed to solely their central tendency. To assess the viability of my forecasting model, I conduct a robust out-of-sample evaluation of the model's performance, finding the model significantly outperforms a competing benchmark autoregressive model, especially when economic uncertainty is high. By examining density forecasts of Treasury yields during the COVID-19 pandemic and the term spread prior to the financial crisis of 2008, I demonstrate the value of the dynamic factor model in expanding the information set available to forward-looking investors and policymakers.In my third chapter, I analyze the impact of the Federal Reserve's adoption of a floor system of monetary policy implementation on the transmission mechanism of changes in the policy rate to US bank balance sheets. Since 2008, in part due to easy monetary policy, United States interest rates have remained at historically low levels. Using US commercial bank call report data, I examine the response of bank profitability and investment to a rise in the rate of interest on reserve balances (IORB). Specifically analyzing the 2015-18 Federal Reserve monetary tightening cycle, I show that, following a rise in the IORB, holding more reserves buffers bank NII growth and asset growth against the adverse effects of a rise in the IORB. Taken together, these results imply that a rise in the policy rate raise profitability for banks with substantial reserve holdings and, when capital constraints bind, expand investment capacity.

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics and Finance written by Congyan Tan and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past two decades, economists have focused intensive effort on building Macroeconomics on a firm Microeconomic foundation. As Macroeconomic research are more integrated with Microeconomics, more and better micro evidence has been examined to verify Macroeconomic theories. One recent development in this line of research uses detailed firm-level evidence to modify current Macroeconomic theories. In this dissertation extensive firm-level evidence are studied to shed light on important macro issues such as investment dynamics, financial frictions, regulations and productivity growth. In this study firm behaviors are studied and modeled by utilizing theories from a variety of fields in Corporate Finance, Public Finance, International Economics, Macroeconomic Dynamics etc. Implications of these evidence on the economic theory are carefully examined and subsequent extension of existing models are proposed. This dissertation consists of three chapters. All chapters study firm behaviors and their implications on macroeconomics, however, the focus of each is different. The first chapter studies issues of credit conditions, uncertainty and investment; the second chapter (co- authored with Zhiyong An) engages the issues of taxation and international corporate finance; the third chapter show how regulations are likely impact foreign investment. The first chapter explores the heterogeneity in firms' response to high economic uncertainty. I show that the effect of high economic uncertainty on firms' investment varies significantly with the degree of financial constraints. Firm decisions are studied in a model of non-convex adjustment costs and time-varying second moment shocks, with financial constraints. In my model, uncertainty makes financially-constrained firms cautious in capital spending and creates long periods of under-investment for these firms. Estimates from firm-level data show that publicly-traded companies' investment-to-capital ratio falls by an average of around 15% in response to a one standard deviation increase in uncertainty. Firms with easier access to credit are found to be much less responsive to uncertainty, consistent with the model's predictions. This implies that the effectiveness of stimulus policy may largely depend on firms' accessibility to credit in episodes of high uncertainty. The second chapter (co-authored with Zhiyong An) studies how firms respond to a quasi-experiment in China. China's new Corporate income Tax Law was passed in March 2007 and took effect on January 1, 2008. It increases the effective corporate income tax rate from about 15% to 25% for foreign investment enterprises (FIEs), while keeps that unchanged at 25% for domestic enterprises (DEs). This study uses a difference-in-differences approach to investigate FIEs' response to the law. Employing the Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database (2002-2008) to implement the analysis, we find evidence that FIEs are responding to the law by shifting their income out of China. Second, the magnitude of the estimated response is larger for enterprises larger in size, which suggests the greater capability of shifting income across countries for larger enterprises. In addition, the response is more acute for investment enterprises from Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan (HMT) than that for other FIEs, which is consistent with the tax haven status of Hong Kong and Macau. The third chapter studies productivity spillovers to domestic firms from foreign direct investment (FDI). Such productivity gain from FDI is considered to be the basis of policies that promote FDI in many countries. In this chapter, firm-level panel data from six European countries are examined to test a number of hypotheses regarding the impact of FDI on the productivity of domestic firms. I find evidence for the backward linkage channel of the FDI spillovers. Using a new dataset, Investing Across Borders 2010 that documents and scores regulations for FDI in 87 countries, this study goes further to explore how FDI-specific policies and institutions impact the spillovers from FDI inflows. Empirical evidence shows that good investment climate is associated with productivity gains, either by direct productivity contribution or by productivity increase in upstream industries. Higher ownership limit is shown to be significantly and positively correlated with productivity. However, productivity impact varies greatly across different investment climate measures.

Download or read book Essays in Macro finance written by Jiwei Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of four essays in macro-finance, focusing on the cause and effect of asset prices, inequality, and welfare. In particular, these essays highlight the role of institutions and structural changes in shaping outcomes of asset markets and of the macro-economy. The two overarching objectives of these essays are to analyze mechanisms of asset price movements and to understand how these asset price movements affect the daily lives of people. The four chapters of this dissertation examine the implications of inertia and stock market non-participation for equity prices, risk sharing, and wealth inequality; causal effects of Chinese Communist Party's cadre promotion system on land prices in China; interconnection between homeownership and marriage; fiscal responses to income inequality shocks. The first chapter quantifies the general equilibrium effects of financial innovation that increases access to equity markets. I study an overlapping generations model with both idiosyncratic and aggregate risk, solved with machine learning techniques. A benchmark economy with limited stock market participation and rebalancing frictions matches the current dynamics of macro aggregates, equity and bond returns, as well as wealth and portfolio concentration. A counterfactual experiment shows how widespread adoption of target date funds would improve risk sharing, reduce inequality, and generate substantial welfare gains for households in the bottom 90% of wealth distribution. The equity premium drops from 6.4% to 1.7%, while the standard deviation of equity returns stabilizes from 21.9% to 14.6%. Welfare implications vary with risk aversion and age. In general, the bottom 90% benefit from improved access to equity markets and better risk sharing, while the top 10% su↵er losses in wealth accumulation. Outcomes are very close between an economy with target date funds and one without any participation costs or rebalancing frictions. The second chapter identifies the causal effect of the Chinese Communist Party's performance- based promotion system to the country's real estate boom from 2003 to 2015. City-level leaders prioritizing economic growth allocate land at discounted prices to industrial firms rather than housing developers. Our analysis reveals that personal connections with provincial superiors are crucial for promotion and hence affect local land and housing supply. When city leaders share the same hometown as newly appointed provincial leaders, their chances of promotion increase by 15%, and GDP performances no longer matters. This connection reduces the need for industrial land allocation, resulting in a higher residential land supply in the city. In addition, cities with leaders who have hometown connections experience significantly higher supplies of residential land, and housing price growth rates are also 5% lower in these cities. The third chapter studies the phenomenon of marriage house in China and its effects on demo- graphics and homeownership. We first show empirical evidence for the complementarity between marriage and homeownership: single males with a marriage house (a house where the newlywed can move into) have 70% higher odds of getting married compared to their counterparts who do not have a marriage house. In addition, the timing of home purchase exhibits a clear cut-o↵ around the time of marriage, with the probability of purchasing a house peaking 0-2 years before marriage and slumping immediately after the time of marriage. Moreover, in the cross section, county house prices and average age at marriage are highly correlated in both level and in growth rate. We then quantify the marriage related incentives for homeownership using a lifecycle consumption-savings model with housing demand and ownership-dependent marriage shocks. In a counterfactual world where the marriage-house complementarity is absent, 45% of households under age 45 would delay their home purchases. Removing the marriage house friction from the marriage market would have slowed down the rise in age at first marriage by 40% between 1995 and 2010. Our results suggest that policies directed at either housing affordability or demographics can have significant consequences for both marriage and housing markets in China. Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over the last quarter century, the fourth chapter estimates a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income distribution changes and account for reverse causality using instruments based on exposure to international trade shocks, international commodity price shocks and national industry demand shocks, as well as lagged endogenous variables, with controls for the level of income, the business cycle and demographics. We find attenuation initially increases in quintile rank, peaks at the middle quintile and then falls for higher income quintiles, consistent with median voter political economy theory and the Stiglitz Director's law. We also provide evidence of considerable and systematic spillover effects on quintiles neither gaining nor losing in the "experiments, " also favoring the middle quintile. "Voting" and "income insurance" coalition analyses are presented. We find a strong negative relationship between average real income and the degree to which taxes and transfers are heavily redistributive.

Download or read book Essays in Macro finance written by Wentao Zhou (Ph.D.) and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters investigating the role of financial frictions in transmitting macroeconomic shocks and its implications for stabilization policies. The first chapter studies both empirically and theoretically how macro uncertainty shocks affect the real economy via a firm balance sheet channel and highlights its novel policy implications. I document that following an increase in macro uncertainty, firm-level capital stock and outstanding debt fall while cash holdings increase, and such capital drop and cash buildup is more pronounced among ex-ante more indebted firms. I develop a quantitative heterogeneous firm model with financial frictions to illustrate the mechanism. In the model, firms fear liquidity shortages for debt repayments, thereby trading off capital investment for less debt burden and more cash holdings as heightened uncertainty creates greater downside risk. Cash buildup is strong, especially among more indebted firms, as cash preserves internal funds for both future debt repayment and growth opportunities triggered by increased uncertainty. A calibrated model featuring the transmission mechanism reproduces the observed impacts of macro uncertainty shocks at both micro and macro levels. Quantitative experiments suggest that conventional stimulus policies, like investment tax credits, yield only modest effects in counteracting the adverse impact of uncertainty shocks. In contrast, credit interventions, such as debt relief, can strongly and effectively stabilize uncertainty-driven recessions. The second chapter studies the macroeconomic implications of debt covenants in a dynamic general equilibrium model that features long-term defaultable debt. In our model, the ex-post penalty associated with covenant violations aligns shareholders' incentives with lenders' interests in the face of default risk, thereby mitigating ex-ante debt dilution and debt overhang. We show that this mechanism has significant macroeconomic effects: (1). it reduces the counter-cyclical variation in firm leverage, default risk, and credit spreads, substantially lowering aggregate volatility; (2). it alleviates the debt overhang problem and thus boosts capital accumulation, resulting in higher wages, output, and consumption. Our results, therefore, challenge the existing literature where debt covenants, modeled as distortionary borrowing constraints in models without default risk, amplify volatility and distort output. Moreover, we show that the calibrated economy with the level of covenant tightness observed in the U.S. approximates the constrained efficient allocation in which a social planner maximizes the values of both equity and debt claims. The third chapter studies how financial frictions influence the transmission of monetary policy. Contrary to the financial accelerator effects on fixed capital investment in the literature, this chapter shows both empirically and theoretically that financial frictions dampen the effects of monetary policy shocks on inventory investment. Using firm-level data combined with externally identified monetary policy shocks, I first show that following contractionary monetary policy shocks, more financially constrained firms cut much fewer inventories than their less financially constrained counterparts despite similar effects of monetary policy shocks on their sales. To explain the empirical patterns, I build a dynamic New Keynesian general equilibrium model in which firms face demand uncertainty and financial frictions and thus manage inventory to avoid stock-outs and cash flow shortfalls. When contractionary monetary policy shocks lower households' demand for goods and thus firms' expected sales and revenues, more financially constrained firms slash their goods' prices and put more inventories on the shelves to increase operating cash flows, thereby avoiding costly external financing. My calibrated model successfully replicates a wide set of data features: pro-cyclical inventories and sales, counter-cyclical inventory-to-sales ratio and markups, and heterogeneous responses across differently financially constrained firms. Counterfactual exercises show that the aggregate effect of monetary policy is smaller in a more financially constrained economy through the inventory channel.

Download or read book Economic Complexity and Equilibrium Illusion written by Ping Chen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-04-05 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Principle of Large Numbers indicates that macro fluctuations have weak microfoundations; persistent business cycles and interrupted technologies can be better characterized by macro vitality and meso foundations. Economic growth is limited by market extent and ecological constraints. The trade-off between stability and complexity is the foundation of cultural diversity and mixed economies. The new science of complexity sheds light on the sources of economic instability and complexity. This book consists of the major work of Professor Ping Chen, a pioneer in studying economic chaos and economic complexity. They are selected from works completed since 1987, including original research on the evolutionary dynamics of the division of labour, empirical and theoretical studies of economic chaos and stochastic models of collective behavior. Offering a new perspective on market instability and the changing world order, the basic pillars in equilibrium economics are challenged by solid evidence of economic complexity and time asymmetry, including Friedman’s theory of exogenous money and efficient market, the Frisch model of noise-driven cycles, the Lucas model of microfoundations and rational expectations, the Black-Scholes model of option pricing, and the Coase theory of transaction costs. Throughout, a general theory based on complex evolutionary economics is developed, which integrates different insights from Marx, Marshall, Schumpeter, Keynes and offers a new understanding of the evolutionary history of division of labour. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers in Economics, including macroeconomics, financial economics, advanced econometrics and economic methodology.

Download or read book Risk Topography written by Markus Brunnermeier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent financial crisis and the difficulty of using mainstream macroeconomic models to accurately monitor and assess systemic risk have stimulated new analyses of how we measure economic activity and the development of more sophisticated models in which the financial sector plays a greater role. Markus Brunnermeier and Arvind Krishnamurthy have assembled contributions from leading academic researchers, central bankers, and other financial-market experts to explore the possibilities for advancing macroeconomic modeling in order to achieve more accurate economic measurement. Essays in this volume focus on the development of models capable of highlighting the vulnerabilities that leave the economy susceptible to adverse feedback loops and liquidity spirals. While these types of vulnerabilities have often been identified, they have not been consistently measured. In a financial world of increasing complexity and uncertainty, this volume is an invaluable resource for policymakers working to improve current measurement systems and for academics concerned with conceptualizing effective measurement.

Download or read book Essays on Finance and Macroeconomics written by Sebastian Tariacuri Di Tella and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies the role of the financial system in the amplification and propagation of business cycles. Chapter 1 studies the origin and propagation of balance sheet recessions. I first show that in standard models driven by TFP shocks, the balance sheet channel disappears when agents are allowed to write contracts on the aggregate state of the economy. In contrast, I show how uncertainty shocks can drive balance sheet recessions with depressed asset prices and growth, and trigger a "flight to quality" event with low interest rates and high risk-premia. Uncertainty shocks create an endogenous hedging motive that induces financial intermediaries to take on a disproportionate fraction of aggregate risk, even when contracts can be written on the aggregate state of the economy. Finally, I explore some implications for financial regulation. Chapter 2 studies a tractable model of dynamic moral hazard with purely pecuniary private benefits. The agent can trade a productive asset and secretly divert funds to a private account and use them to "recontract": at any time he can offer a new continuation contract to the principal, who accepts if the new contract is attractive. The main result is that the optimal contract can be characterized as the solution to a standard portfolio problem with a simple "skin in the game" constraint. The setting places few restrictions on preferences and the distribution of shocks, distinguishes between (observable) aggregate shocks and (unobservable) idiosyncratic shocks, and takes arbitrary general equilibrium prices as given. This makes the results easily applicable to many macro and financial applications. Chapter 3 explores under what conditions the presence of moral hazard can create a balance sheet amplification channel. If the private action of the agent exposes him to aggregate risk through his unobserved private benefit, the optimal contract will try to over-expose him to aggregate risk to deter him from misbehaving. This creates a tradeoff between aggregate and idiosyncratic risk-sharing. More productive agents naturally want to leverage more and therefore have larger incentives to distort their aggregate risk-sharing in order to reduce their exposure to idiosyncratic risk. In equilibrium, therefore, more productive agents take on a disproportionate fraction of aggregate risk, creating a balance sheet channel.

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 Financial Economics and Macro Finance written by Jonathan-Julian Federle and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Uncertainty and Macroeconomic Dynamics written by Jeffrey A. Levy and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation I examine economic uncertainty, particularly from the perspective of disaggregation below the national level. In part one I outline the building of news-based uncertainty measures for all 50 US states plus Washington DC. I analyze different search specifications, finding that the simplest set of terms involving one group for "economy" and one group for "uncertainty" has the highest resolution, while yielding similar results to more focused news searches, including one similar to the ubiquitous policy search from Baker et al. (2016), and an alternative specification designed to eliminate false positives. I also explore the differences between two other national uncertainty measures - the VIX stock market volatility index from the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and the unforecastable macroeconomic factors from Jurado et al. (2015). In part two, I build upon the analysis of the state uncertainty measures begun in part one. I show that analyzing uncertainty at the national level obscures significant state-level variation, with state-to-national uncertainty correlations ranging from 0.124 to 0.913, while some inter-state uncertainty correlations even turn negative. I then show that VAR analysis using state-level unemployment figures yields impulse response functions that are remarkably similar to existing national-level uncertainty research, with 92% of states exhibiting a rise in unemployment that peaks near 12 months after an uncertainty shock, then overshoots the starting point for a time. Finally, in part three I attempt to get at the causal effects of an uncertainty shock, as VAR analysis is unable to do, by applying a difference-in-difference framework to the natural experiment of military base closures. I look at the 1991, 1993, 1995, and 2005 rounds of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, whereby the government moves military jobs in and out of bases through a process that is, at least initially, heavily insulated from confounding economic indicators and political influence. This creates asymmetric and exogenous uncertainty shocks in places with different military employment, which I use to show that a one-percentage point higher military share of employment causes a tenth of a percentage point higher unemployment rate in a given Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) during a BRAC round.

Download or read book Essays on the Theory of Macro economic Dynamics Under Uncertainty written by Sheri M. Markose and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: