Download or read book Essays on Information and Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Interaction and Market Structure written by Domenico Delli Gatti and published by . This book was released on 2000-03-27 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Interaction and Market Structure written by Domenico Delli Gatti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2000-03-27 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of essays which examine how the properties of aggregate variables are influenced by the actions and interactions of heterogenous individuals in different economic contexts. The common denominator of the essays is a critique of the representative agent hypothesis. If this hypothesis were correct, the behaviour of the aggregate variable would simply be the reproduction of individual optimising behaviour. In the methodology of the hard sciences, one of the achievements of the quantum revolution has been the rebuttal of the notion that aggregate behaviour can be explained on the basis of the behaviour of a single unit: the elementary particle does not even exist as a single entity but as a network, a system of interacting units. In this book, new tracks in economics which parallel the developments in physics mentioned above are explored. The essays, in fact are contributions to the analysis of the economy as a complex evolving system of interacting agents.

Download or read book Essays in Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics written by Minsu Chang and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two chapters that explore how micro-level heterogeneity helps us understand the dynamics of macroeconomic variables. Chapter 2 shows that the evolving likelihood of marriage and divorce is an essential factor in accounting for the changes in housing decisions over time in the United States. I build and estimate a life-cycle model of single and married households who face exogenous age-dependent marital transition shocks and then conduct a decomposition analysis between 1970 and 1995. The results show that household formation shocks could account for about 30% of the increase in the single's homeownership rate and play a crucial role in generating the observed sign of change in portfolio share of married households. The extended analysis on recent years after 1995 shows that the continuing decrease in marriage prospects contributed to push up the single's homeownership rate during the housing boom in the mid 2000s. Chapter 3 develops a state-space model with a state-transition equation that takes the form of a functional vector autoregression and stacks macroeconomic aggregates and a cross-sectional density. The measurement equation captures the error in estimating log densities from repeated cross-sectional samples. The log densities and the transition kernels in the law of motion of the states are approximated by sieves, which leads to a finite-dimensional representation in terms of macroeconomic aggregates and sieve coefficents. We illustrate how the model works based on the simulation of the Krusell-Smith economy and conduct an empirical analysis on the joint dynamics of technology shocks, per capita GDP, employment rates, and the earnings distribution.

Download or read book Essays on Heterogeneity and Macroeconomics written by Ömer Tuğrul Açıkgöz and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first chapter of this dissertation is based on the observation that during the past 50 years, the US economy has been characterized by a rapid decline of labor unions and a substantial rise in wage inequality. The chapter proposes that the rise in the skill premium in the non-union sector, for instance, due to technical change, can potentially explain these trends. Based on the premise that labor unions compress wages between skilled and unskilled workers, a larger skill premium encourages skilled workers to withdraw from the union. If this is accompanied by a fall in the productivity of unskilled workers, firms become more reluctant to hire the relatively expensive union workers, reinforcing the decline in the unionization rate. To evaluate this hypothesis, we develop a macroeconomic model of endogenous union membership with heterogenous agents, where union members are selected from the middle of the skill distribution and have significant wage gains that are decreasing in skill, consistent with US evidence. The model predicts that the rise in skill prices in the non-union sector explains 30-60% of the decline in the unionization rate. It was argued that the declining union activity contributed to the rise in wage inequality by changing the labor force composition. We find this effect to be much smaller due to selection into union jobs. In the second chapter, I investigate the role of heterogeneity and misaggregation in explaning the empirically missing correlations between the relative consumption and real exchange rates between countries, referred to as the Backus-Smith puzzle. I construct a two-country general-equilibrium model with heterogeneous households that choose to consume either an imported good, or its domestic variant. I show that upon aggregation, the corresponding 'representative agent'' acts as if he is subject to taste shocks, which works towards weakening the tight link between relative prices and quantities. The model therefore constitutes a microfoundation for what shows up as taste shocks in the data. I argue that the missing correlations could be an artifact of heterogeneity"--Page v-vi.

Download or read book Three Essays on Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics written by Ryan Douglas Edwards and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics and Heterogeneity written by Christian Rörig 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 Essays on Macroeconomics Monetary Policy and Firm Heterogeneity written by Claire Thürwächter and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics with Plant Heterogeneity written by Jinhee Woo and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The theme of this thesis is to understand the role of plant heterogeneity in shaping the dynamics of aggregate economy along business cycles. The first chapter investigates the cyclicality of plant entry and exit and its role in shaping the dynamics of aggregate economy along business cycles. The second chapter provides micro founded explanations regarding the dynamics of capital utilization in response to the news shock. The United States establishment exit rate is acyclical. This poses a challenge to canonical models of industry dynamics-e.g., Hopenhayn (1992), which imply a strongly counter-cyclical exit rate. To reconcile this gap between theory and data, imperfect information is introduced. Potential entrants have imperfect information about their productivity, leading to a signal extraction problem. When the volatility of idiosyncratic productivity dominates that of aggregate, as we observe in the micro data, potential entrants overestimate their productivity, and the value of entering, in booms. This amplified entry further increases factor prices and crowds out marginal incumbents, making the exit rate almost acyclical. The imperfect information mechanism proposed here also yields three testable implications: (i) entry is more cyclical in the industries where idiosyncratic components dominate; (ii) plant entry by new firms is more cyclical than that by existing firms; (iii) plants established by new firms during booms are more likely to exit rapidly. We show that all three predictions are consistent with the data. In the second chapter, by estimating a panel VAR on two-digit manufacturing data using the identification scheme proposed by Beadury and Portier (2006), I find positive co-movement between investment and capital utilization (the workweek of capital) in response to a news shock. This is inconsistent with the canonical q-theory model of capital adjustment dynamics where good news about the future raises the marginal value of capital and leads the firm to preserve its capital for later use through less utilization today. With fixed costs in capital adjustment, plants make discrete, or "lumpy", adjustments such that if plants are subject to decreasing returns, q declines as they near the point of investment. Since good news makes large investments more likely, this triggers a fall in q and reduces the opportunity cost of utilization. To simultaneously explain the co-movement of investment and capital utilization with plant level investment behavior, I propose a heterogeneous plant model that combines fixed adjustment costs and an endogenous capital utilization choice. When the model economy is calibrated to match salient features of the plant level investment rate distribution, it generates positive co-movement between investment and capital utilization."--Pages v-vi.

Download or read book Three Essays on Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics written by Mohamed Diaby and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Regions written by Chang Liu and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies macroeconomics with regional heterogeneity in three general dimensions. First, it documents some novel empirical patterns of regional heterogeneity (in Chapter 1, 2, 3). Second, these empirical facts are used to identify key economic forces underlying theoretical models (in Chapter 1 and 3). Third, aggregate implications of regional heterogeneity are also studied (in Chapter 1). In the first chapter of this dissertation, I highlight time-varying regional risk and federal fiscal transfer policy as two competing forces driving regional risk sharing over the business cycle and in turn quantify their impacts on aggregate fluctuations. I find that during an economic downturn, increased regional risk worsens risk sharing and amplifies the impact of aggregate productivity shocks. However, state-contingent federal government transfers provide additional risk sharing and help stabilize the aggregate economy, by providing insurance to the regions that need it the most. In the second chapter (joint with Noah Williams), we first estimate a quarterly dataset for state-level aggregates by building a novel empirical framework that allows for mixed-frequency raw data with measurement errors. We then apply this dataset to study the monetary policy effects at the state levels. We find that states behave remarkably homogeneous with each other in their responses of output and price to an unanticipated monetary policy shock. In the third chapter (joint with Noah Williams), we use the state-level quarterly dataset to analyze the impact of unexpected changes in federal personal and corporate income taxes. We find substantial heterogeneity in the impact of federal fiscal policy across states, with more than half having no significant response to the tax cuts. In addition, less capital-intensive states have larger responses to corporate tax cuts. Although puzzling in standard models, a model with corporate and non-corporate sectors is consistent with this evidence. Overall, our results suggest the importance of variation and reallocation across states in evaluating federal policy.

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics and Household Heterogeneity written by Isaac Gross and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomic Policies in Heterogeneous Agent Models written by Alaïs Martin-Baillon and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is now recognized that the heterogeneity of economic agents plays a crucial role in understanding the fluctuations of an economy. The different chapters of my thesis serve the same question: How does heterogeneity changes the way economic policies should be conducted? Today, heterogeneous-agent macroeconomics is developing in several directions, each shedding different light on the problems we face as economists. My thesis is at the confluence of the different facets of this field. The first chapter of my thesis, participates in the heterogeneous agent macroeconomics that derives analytical solutions in reduced-heterogeneity models. I study how governments should increase or decrease taxes on firms over the business cycle. I show that taking into account firms heterogeneity greatly changes tax policy recommendations. The second chapter of my thesis is part of quantitative heterogeneous agent macroeconomics. We study whether monetary policy should use its ability to redistribute wealth among heterogenous households to achieve its objectives. The third chapter of my thesis participates in field that uses micro data to understand macroeconomics and to design public policies. I estimate firms' propensities to invest to better understand how economic policies can vary firms' investment by varying their income.

Download or read book Essays on Household Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics written by Lukas Nord and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contains four independent essays studying the consequences of household heterogeneity for Macroeconomics. The first chapter studies the implications of household heterogeneity for equilibrium prices. I break with the canonical assumptions of homothetic preferences and the law of one price to show how heterogeneity in consumption baskets and search for price bargains affects posted prices. Analytical results from search theory and empirical evidence from big data on households' grocery transactions show that price distributions respond to the composition of buyers. In a quantitative heterogeneous agent model with endogenous price dispersion for multiple varieties, I find that the response of retailers to households' search effort is quantitatively important to differentiate between inequality in expenditure and consumption. It more than doubles the direct effect of paying more or less given posted prices, which has been the focus of previous literature. Furthermore, I find that household heterogeneity helps to account for the empirical cyclicality of retail prices and markups in response to aggregate shocks, and has implications for the response of prices to redistributive policies. In the second chapter, which is joint work with Annika Bacher and Philipp Grübener, we show how households with two members can insure themselves against the job loss of a primary earner through the labor force entry of a nonparticipating spouse. We document empirically that this margin is predominantly used by young households. In a two-member life cycle model with endogenous arrival rates, human capital accumulation, and extensive-margin labor supply, we explore how differences in labor market opportunities and asset holdings contribute to this pattern. Our findings suggest that the age difference is predominantly explained by better insurance through asset holdings for the old, while differences in arrival rates and human capital play a smaller role. In the third chapter, which is joint work with Caterina Mendicino and Marcel Peruffo, we study differences in the exposure to bank distress along the income distribution. We develop a two-asset heterogeneous agent model with a financial sector and use this framework to show that banking sector losses disproportionately harm low-income households while rich households adjust their savings behavior to profit from fluctuations in asset prices. This is why welfare losses from bank distress are considerably more dispersed than consumption responses. We find the model-implied consumption responses to be in line with empirical evidence on the relationship between bank equity returns and consumption across households. In the forth chapter, I study how wealth holdings can affect households' incentives to form precise expectations about future inflation rates. I document empirically how the dispersion of expectations changes along the wealth distribution and develop a consumption-savings model with costly expectation formation to study implications for the effectiveness of forward guidance policies. I show endogenous expectation formation to significantly lower the effectiveness of forward guidance policies due to selection in which households are paying attention to news about inflation.

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Heterogeneity written by Laurent E. Calvet and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics with Heterogeneity and Inequality written by Zhigang Ge and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract Chapter 1. Heterogeneous Entrepreneurial Ability and Wealth Inequality Models with entrepreneurship can reproduce high wealth concentration at the top. The key assumption is the borrowing constraint, that is, households are unable to borrow enough assets to start a business or invest optimally in the business. However, some empirical evidences show that borrowing constraint does not matter for the majority of households in the US. This paper seeks to generate high wealth concentration at the top without assuming borrowing constraint. The baseline model that introduces heterogeneity in entrepreneurial ability is able to match the wealth distribution while the model assuming same entrepreneurial ability fails. Besides wealth distribution, the baseline model generates other moments that are consistent with the data. Chapter 2. Taxing Top Earners: The Role of Entrepreneurs This paper studies the optimal top marginal income tax rate in a quantitative framework with entrepreneurial choice, financing constraints, and realistic earnings and wealth distributions. I find that the revenue-maximizing top tax rate is approximately 41 percent -- close to the recent levels in the US. In contrast, when calibrated with only workers to match realistic earnings and wealth distributions, the model predicts a revenue-maximizing top tax rate of 81 percent -- close to the established view. There are two channels through which the baseline model has a lower revenue-maximizing top tax rate. First, the wealth distribution channel: increasing the top tax rate decreases wealth accumulation and leads to a less skewed wealth distribution in the long run (there are more top entrepreneurs with low wealth and less top entrepreneurs with high wealth). With financing constraints, there is a similar change in the business earnings distribution, implying a fall in the average business earnings at the top. Second, the general equilibrium effect on labor earnings of workers: in the model with entrepreneurs, increasing the top tax rate reduces the capital stock much more than labor supply, which decreases the capital-labor ratio and thus the equilibrium wage rate in the model economy. Finally, I find that the welfare-maximizing top marginal income tax rate is close to the revenue-maximizing one. Chapter 3. Household Heterogeneity and Consumption Amplification Macroeconomic models with household heterogeneity in wealth can generate larger consumption response to aggregate shocks compared to a representative-agent economy. In other words, there is consumption amplification associated with wealth heterogeneity. However, I find that in a Krusell-Smith type real business cycle (RBC) model, this amplification effect is only significant at the onset of a recession and gradually dies out as the recession proceeds. The finding is of interest because part of the motivation for the widely adoption of models with wealth heterogeneity is their different and empirically plausible implications for consumption dynamics compared with representative-agent models. I then introduce household heterogeneity in housing and find that the model with housing has more persistent amplification effect on consumption during the recession.

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Agents written by Pierre-Alexandre Noual and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation investigates two models of macroeconomics with heterogeneous agents. The first chapter analyzes a setup where agents are ex ante identical, yet receive idiosyncratic income shocks which make them heterogeneous ex post. A private information friction gives rise to incomplete risk-sharing as a constrained-efficient allocation. The second chapter again considers ex post heterogeneous agents: they have identical preferences but face idiosyncratic shocks to their earning capacity. There the focus is not on risk-sharing, but on the aggregate consequences for labor supply.