Download or read book Three Essays on Economics and Information Shocks written by Kyle I. Carlson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A person living in an industrialized society has almost no choice but to receive information daily with negative implications for himself or others. His attention will often be drawn to the ups and downs of economic indicators or the alleged misdeeds of leaders and organizations. Reacting to new information is central to economics, but economics typically ignores the affective aspect of the response, for example, of stress or anger. These essays present the results of considering how the affective aspect of the response can influence economic outcomes. The first chapter presents an experiment in which individuals were presented with information about various non-profit organizations and allowed to take actions that rewarded or punished those organizations. When social interaction was introduced into this environment an asymmetry between rewarding and punishing appeared. The net effects of punishment became greater and more variable, whereas the effects of reward were unchanged. The individuals were more strongly influenced by negative social information and used that information to target unpopular organizations. These behaviors contributed to an increase in inequality among the outcomes of the organizations. The second and third chapters present empirical studies of reactions to negative information about local economic conditions. Economic factors are among the most prevalent stressors, and stress is known to have numerous negative effects on health. These chapters document localized, transient effects of the announcement of information about large-scale job losses. News of mass layoffs and shut downs of large military bases are found to decrease birth weights and gestational ages among babies born in the affected regions. The effect magnitudes are close to those estimated in similar studies of disasters.

Download or read book Three Essays on Economics and Information Shocks written by Kyle I. Carlson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A person living in an industrialized society has almost no choice but to receive information daily with negative implications for himself or others. His attention will often be drawn to the ups and downs of economic indicators or the alleged misdeeds of leaders and organizations. Reacting to new information is central to economics, but economics typically ignores the affective aspect of the response, for example, of stress or anger. These essays present the results of considering how the affective aspect of the response can influence economic outcomes. The first chapter presents an experiment in which individuals were presented with information about various non-profit organizations and allowed to take actions that rewarded or punished those organizations. When social interaction was introduced into this environment an asymmetry between rewarding and punishing appeared. The net effects of punishment became greater and more variable, whereas the effects of reward were unchanged. The individuals were more strongly influenced by negative social information and used that information to target unpopular organizations. These behaviors contributed to an increase in inequality among the outcomes of the organizations. The second and third chapters present empirical studies of reactions to negative information about local economic conditions. Economic factors are among the most prevalent stressors, and stress is known to have numerous negative effects on health. These chapters document localized, transient effects of the announcement of information about large-scale job losses. News of mass layoffs and shut downs of large military bases are found to decrease birth weights and gestational ages among babies born in the affected regions. The effect magnitudes are close to those estimated in similar studies of disasters.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Propagation of Monetary Shocks in Open Economies written by Søren Vester Sørensen and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Monetary and Financial Economics written by Liang Ma and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of monetary and financial economics. Specifically, we use high-frequency financial data to study monetary policies with a focus on the information effect, namely, that some of the interest rate movements around central bank announcements are not policy-driven, but are results of the market becoming aware of the central bank's view about future economic prospects. Understanding the role played by the information effect will help us apprehend monetary policy implications in both normal times and extraordinary situations. Chapter 1 evaluates the impact of unconventional monetary policy in the newly developed instrumental variable structural Vector Autoregression (VAR) framework. In the current low interest rate environment, central banks must resort to using unconventional monetary policies, such as forward guidance and quantitative easing, to flight recessions. To empirically evaluate the effectiveness of these unconventional policies, we need to rely on the clean policy shock. A prominent concern is that the often used high-frequency interest rate surprises not only reflect unexpected policy changes, but also contain the information effect. We contribute to the literature by using a heteroskedasticity identification approach, taking advantage of changes in the relative dominance of economic shocks around different macroeconomic announcements. Analysis based on clean policy shocks suggests that the unconventional policies successfully aided the recovery in the U.S. More importantly, we show that the information effect, while it may introduce bias, is rather modest when it comes to estimating the real impact of unconventional monetary policies. Chapter 2 studies the stock return pattern after the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcement. This research is motivated by recent literature that documents stock returns drifts, both before and after FOMC announcements, according to policy rate surprises. Indeed, research has shown that the information contained in the central bank announcement is multifaceted: its current monetary policy stances (monetary policy news) and news about future economic prospects (non-monetary policy news). Our contribution is to combine these two strands of literature. To the best of our knowledge, no study has looked at stock market reactions to the non-monetary news stemming from policy announcements. We identify both good and bad news events using a combination of sign restriction with high-frequency financial prices. The novel finding is that following bad FOMC announcements, that is the market interpreted the Fed announcements as revealing negative information about the economy, we observe significant positive stock returns in a 20-day period. We call this the ``post-FOMC drift.'' Further analysis suggests that the drift is likely caused by relatively heightened risks associated with bad announcements, although the drift is consistent with market overreactions as well. Moreover, the post FOMC drift is a market-wide phenomenon and can be exploited in an easy-to-implement trading strategy with a historical record of earning 40\% of the annual equity premium. In Chapter 3, we explore the channels through which the FOMC announcements affect the financial market. While much of the existing literature measures the surprise components with only changes in policy rates (surrounding the announcement), we contribute to the existing literature by taking a broader view through examining unexpected changes in longer-term yields, corporate credit spreads, and inflation expectations (a proxy for growth prospects), using high-frequency financial data. Through a regression analysis, our findings show that these additional surprises provide orthogonal information and sharply increase the goodness of fit in explaining stock returns around FOMC announcements, with the inclusion of inflation expectations having the biggest contribution. The important role of inflation expectation suggests that the current literature, which uses stock prices together with nominal rates to disentangle the information contents of central bank announcements, may be too limited in the scope of information it uses.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Propagtion of Monetary Shocks in Open Economies written by Søren Vester Sørensen and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Relation Between Sectoral Shocks and Aggregate Demand written by Koen Vermeylen and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Uncertainty and Learning by Economic Agents written by Hilde Patron and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Implications of Limited Attention in Economics written by Jérémy Boccanfuso and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is a collection of three essays on the economic implications of limited attention. It is supplemented with a general introduction (Chapter 1).The first chapter introduces an ongoing paradigm shift in the macroeconomic literature from full-information rational expectations to rationally inattentive economic agents. It then presents some characteristics of this new class of models and current challenges in the literature that motivates the work in this dissertation.The second chapter is a contribution to consumption theory. It studies the consumption-saving problem of a consumer who faces a fixed cost for paying attention to noisy information and whose attention strategy, i.e., whether or not she pays attention, can be a function of the underlying information. At the optimum, consumers chose to be at- tentive when evidence accumulates far from their prior beliefs. The model provides an explanation for four puzzling empirical findings on consumption and expectations. First, consumers' attention depends on the information content. Second, aggregate information rigidities vary over the business cycle. Third, consumers only react to large anticipated shocks and neglect the impact of small ones. Fourth, aggregate consumption dynamics vary over the business cycle. The third chapter is a theoretical contribution to the literature in behavioral public economics. It studies how information frictions in agents' tax perceptions affect the design of actual tax policy. Developing a positive theory of tax policy, it shows that agents' inattention interacts with policymaking and induces the government to implementinefficiently high tax rates. It then quantifies the magnitude of this policy distortion for the US economy. Overall, the findings suggest that existing information frictions - and thereby tax complexity - lead to undesirable, large and regressive tax increases.The fourth chapter is an empirical contribution to the macroeconomic literature on information frictions. Using the ECB survey of professional forecasters, it estimates a two margin forecast formation process that allows for forecast rounding on individual and consensus forecast data. Forecasters decide when to revise their forecast (extensive margin). When they do, they slowly incorporate new information (intensive margin) and may report a rounded value for their new forecast (rounding). It finds that these three rigidities simultaneously exist and estimate their respective contribution. The overall forecast stickiness is almost exclusively the consequence of the rigidities at the intensive margin. It then derives quarterly time series for the evolution of information frictions and proposes a simple mapping to account for these variations in economic models.

Download or read book Three Essays in International Economics written by Alan Glen Isaac and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Economic Fluctuations written by Stephane Dupraz and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because distinguishing models is harder in a noisier economy, the model is one of endogenous ambiguity. Because one agent's noise is another's private information, one agent's reliance on his private information increases how much ambiguity his neighbor faces. I revisit the role of private and public information in this new light. On the positive side, I show that the equilibrium depends less on fundamentals as agents become more ambiguity averse, and not at all in the limit where they become infinitely so. I also show that, because it makes agents trust their model more, the release of public information drives the economy toward fundamentals whenever ambiguity-aversion is high enough, in contrast to the standard result under rational expectations. On the normative side, I show that the equilibrium features too much dependence on fundamentals: agents would rather live in a world that they understand better, even if it means living in a world that is less responsive to changes in fundamentals.

Download or read book Essays on the Great Depression written by Ben S. Bernanke and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Nobel Prize–winning economist and former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, a landmark book that provides vital lessons for understanding financial crises and their sometimes-catastrophic economic effects As chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve during the Global Financial Crisis, Ben Bernanke helped avert a greater financial disaster than the Great Depression. And he did so by drawing directly on what he had learned from years of studying the causes of the economic catastrophe of the 1930s—work for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize. Essays on the Great Depression brings together Bernanke’s influential work on the origins and economic lessons of the Depression, and this new edition also includes his Nobel Prize lecture.

Download or read book Three Essays on Monetary and Financial Economics written by Xueli Cao (Ph.D. in Economics) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-chapter dissertation focuses on the research topics in Monetary and Financial Economics. The first paper examines the time-varying impact of U.S. monetary policy shocks on asset prices. The monetary policy shock is identified using robust sign restrictions in a time-varying factor-augmented VAR (TVP-FAVAR). Time variations are found in both the variance of policy shocks and transmission to asset prices. The relative importance of monetary policy shocks rise significantly over time although the shock size of monetary policy shocks has declined in the sample. In terms of transmission mechanism, asset prices are more responsive in the latter part of the sample (post-1984Q1) when normalizing the shock size. We also document the effects of monetary policy on asset prices are significantly larger for recessionary periods. Finally, the paper also identifies the role of demand and supply shocks in determining the movements of asset prices. In the second paper, I investigate the spillover effects between the Growth Enterprises Market (GEM) and the Main Board stock market in China. Specifically, a multivariate GARCH model and a multivariate GARCH-in-mean model are estimated using daily data for the GEM Board and the Main Board over period June 1, 2010 - December 31, 2016. The results indicate that the Main Board leads the GEM Board in the first order and there is no mean overflow from the GEM Board to the Main Board. However, the quantile dependence, measured by cross-quantilogram, shows that there are asymmetry distributional spillover effects from the GEM Board to the Main Board. From the point of view of volatility, the GEM Board has effects on the Main Board, and it lasts a period of time in the future. The volatility of the GEM also affects the return of the Main Board negatively. Lastly, the GEM has a one-way effect on the Main Board in illiquidity. In the third paper, we document the effects of institutional investors on the qualitative information disclosure of earnings conference calls. Utilizing conference call and institutional ownership data between 2005 and 2016, we find that aggregate institutional ownership dampens conference call tone. The effects of institutional investors on tone are causal based on results from indexed firms. Consistent with hypotheses regarding investors horizon, short-term institutional investors are associated with greater conference call tone, as well as potentially opportunistic trading, while long-term investors decrease tone. Market participants can generally disentangle the impact of institutional investors on tone based on investor type.

Download or read book Three Essays on Regional Economics from the Perspective of Transportation Demand Shocks and Population Aging written by Xiaochen Zhang (Ph. D. in environmental economics) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second chapter investigates local labor supply’s responses to demand shocks during the recession years in the context of China. Greater flexibility of the local labor market is an indicator of stronger local economies. The rationale is that states or regions within a country may receive asymmetric demand shocks, so that people from severely-hit regions may move towards less-affected regions, thus reducing the aggregate unemployment rate. It is convenient for economists to study the impacts of 2007 economic recession on countries other than the US, because this recession can be seen as an exogenous shock for other countries. I try to isolate the impacts of this demand shock on different local labor supply responses by examining pre- and post-recession effects. Specifically, the effects of employment changes on the unemployment rate, labor force participation rate, and migration are investigated. To deal with endogeneity, “Bartik-style” industrial mix and “Regress-M” are used as instrument variables to identify causal effects. Results show that the role of migration in alleviating negative demand shocks has decreased over time, which could be the consequence of government-led local development policy.

Download or read book Three Essays in Macroeconomics written by Thomas Philippon and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Cont.) Consistent with conventional priors, the results indicate that interest rates in Hong Kong react much more to U.S. interest rate shocks and shocks to international risk premia than interest rates in Singapore. The results are less clear-cut in the comparison of Argentina and Mexico: while interest rates in Mexico seem to react less to U.S. interest rate shocks, they react about the same to bond spread shocks, in addition to a significant impact on the exchange rate.

Download or read book Three Essays on Development Economics written by Mizuhiro Suzuki (Ph.D.) and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies how households and individuals in developing countries deal with economic shocks and economic needs. In the first chapter, I study a Latin American ceremony, quincean̳eras, and how households manage the large expenditures on the expensive ceremony. I explore the coping strategy of households in Mexico and how such expensive events can affect economic outcomes such as household businesses and social networks. While the large expenditures on festivals and ceremonies in developing have been documented in the literature on development economics, few empirical studies have been conducted, especially on how poor households afford the events and what the economic consequences of such events are. This study fills the gap in the literature. The second and third chapters investigate the effect of weather shocks on individual behaviors in the context of developing countries. In the second chapter, I explore how temperature affects the work performance of bureaucrats. In particular, I study how the contents of corruption reports are affected by temperature during fieldwork. Using the federal audit program in Brazil, I find evidence that heat increases the probability of reporting corruption. This suggests that the work performance of bureaucrats is affected by external and seemingly irrelevant factors such as temperature. In the third chapter, I investigate the effect of temperature on exam performance and the interaction between exam stakes and exam performance. I approach these research questions by using exam score data in a centralized exam in Brazil and an institutional reform that increased the stakes of the exam. I find that the high temperature negatively affects the students' exam scores and the temperature effect becomes smaller when exam stakes are higher.

Download or read book Three Essays on Empirical Macroeconomics written by Christopher C. Douglas and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Development Economics written by Mukesh Kumar Ray and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: