Cette thèse montre que l’on peut trouver chez Marx, Veblen et Hawtrey trois théories pré-keynésiennes de l’instabilité financière. Elle dégage, pour chacun d’eux, le cadre théorique qu’il met en place et qui lui permet de poser la question du rôle de la finance dans la dynamique économique. Elle analyse ensuite leurs écrits pour montrer que l’on peut en déduire des théories (incomplètes) de l’instabilité financière, c’est-à-dire que les perturbations économiques sont dues à la manière dont les entreprises se financent. Le chapitre I reconstruit la théorie marxienne des marchés financiers, ce qui permet, dans le chapitre II, de montrer le rôle central joué par la finance dans l’explication du cycle économique chez Marx. Le chapitre III dégage les éléments qui font de la théorie de Veblen une théorie du capitalisme financier, puis, dans le chapitre IV, discute cette dernière pour montrer qu’il s’agit d’une théorie de l’instabilité financière. Le chapitre V propose une représentation du modèle macroéconomique de Hawtrey, à partir de laquelle le chapitre VI dégage les conditions dans lesquelles le crédit est instable dans sa théorie. Le chapitre VII fait le lien entre les théories de ces auteurs et les faits économiques dont la connaissance a nourri leur réflexion : les théories de l’instabilité financière sont à la fois une explication, une représentation et un projet de régulation du capitalisme financier / The thesis demonstrates that three pre-keynesians theories of financial instability can be found in Marx, Veblen and Hawtrey. For each of these three authors, the argument is that the theoretical frame displayed allows him question the role of finance in the economic dynamic. Then, analysis of their main writings shows that theories of financial instability can be infered from them. In chapter I, the marxian theory of financial markets is reconstituted paving the way to the demonstration of the central role played by finance in the explanation of the business cycle in Marx’s theory in Chapter 2. In Chapter III, we show what elements in Veblen’s theory constitutes a theory of finance capitalism. Then, the discussion in Chapter IV shows how it a theory of financial instability. In Chapter V is displayed a representation of of Hawtrey’s macro-model. Chapter VI highlights the conditions under which credit is unstable in his theory. Chapter VII shows the links between the three authors’ theories and the economic facts that nurtured their thinking. It shows that their theories of financial instability are an explanation, a representation et a project of regulation of financial capitalism.

Investerare har under en lång tid försökt reda ut huruvida det går att slå marknaden. Vilket perspektiv som investeraren har med avseende på möjligheten att slå marknaden blir aktuellt vid val av investeringsalternativ. Ett vanligt förekommande alternativ är fonder där flöden av kapital är beroende av faktorer på makronivå. Hur en investerare väljer att placera sitt kapital är även påverkat av den upplevda risknivån som innefattar diverse faktorer. Syftet med uppsatsen var att studera hur nettoflödet av investeringsfonder korrelerade med konjunkturläget, som en faktor på makronivå, under perioden 1999 till 2017. Därtill observerades vilka faktorer och risker som påverkade investerare vid val av investeringsfond. En kvantitativ forskningsstrategi användes och två undersökningar genomfördes, en analys av historisk data samt en enkätundersökning. Resultatet visade att det inte återfanns några starka korrelationer mellan investeringsfondernas nettoflöden och konjunkturläget. Därtill påvisades att de observerade faktorerna påverkade i högre- eller lägre grad, dock var spridningen mellan faktorerna jämna. Den risk som tolererades mest var risken som enskilda företag stod inför. Sammanfattningsvis noteras att nettoflöden till fonder är en komplicerad process som sannolikt är beroende flertalet variabler. Undersökningen resulterade därutöver i en förståelse att varken risk eller diverse faktorer sticker nämnvärt ut i en investerares val av fond. / Investors have for a long time tried to find out whether the market can be beaten. What perspective the investor has with regard to the possibility of beating the market becomes relevant when choosing an investment alternative. One commo alternative is funds where capital flows are dependent on factors at amacro level. How an investor chooses to place his or her capitalis also influenced by the perceived level of risk that includes various factors. The purpose of the paper was to study how the netflow of investment funds correlated with the businesscycle,as a factor at the macrolevel,during the period 1999 to 2017. In addition, it was observed which factors and risks influenced investors in the choice of investment fund. A quantitative research strategy was used and two surveys were conducted, an analysis of historical data and a questionnaire survey. The results howed that there were no strong correlations between the investment funds' netflows and the businesscycle. In addition, it was demonstrated that the observed factors affected to a higher-or lower degree, however, the spread between the factors was even.The most tolerable risk was the risk faced by individual companies. In summary, it is noted that netflows to funds are a complicated process that is probably dependent on several variables. In addition, the paper resulted in an understanding that neither risk nor various factors stands out in an investor's choice of fund.

Thesis advisor: Peter Ireland / Thesis advisor: Matteo Iacoviello / The dissertation is composed by two chapters. In the first one, I study the role of credit constraints and incomplete markets in the short run transmission of monetary shocks, using the superneutrality result that would obtain from preference separability in the Sidrauski model under complete markets as a benchmark. I find that money demand heterogeneity stemming from binding credit constraints invalidates the superneutrality result. I show this result under two alternative settings. In a simple two agents model, with heterogeneity in the rates of time preference, whether positive shocks to the growth rate of money are expansionary or contractionary crucially depends on the transfer scheme adopted by the monetary authority to rebate seigniorage transfers: redistributional effects implied by symmetric lump-sum transfers are contractionary, while wealth-neutral transfers are expansionary. In a model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risk, the approximate aggregation property fails to hold due to the high degree of heterogeneity of money demand and to the properties of the cross-sectional distribution of money holdings, suggesting the inadequacy of the representative agent assumption and the need for a more elaborate approximation of the wealth distribution to predict prices. In the second chapter, we propose a real business cycle model with labor and credit market frictions in which borrowing is conditional on employment status. Relative to a conventional set up, and as long as credit is valued positively, our model generates a non-standard labor/leisure trade off that induces job applicants to accept lower wages and firms to post more vacancies, ultimately increasing employment. A shock to the demand of durable goods, by increasing the collateral value, reduce the opportunity cost of working, and generates an increase in employment and output. The transmission of a financial shock that increases the loan to value ratio, is dampened by the costs, in terms of leisure, incurred by the borrowers. We show that this mechanism is able to generate the positive comovement between outstanding household debt and employment observed in the data, whereas a conventional model, in which employment status is irrelevant for obtaining credit, predicts a counterfactual negative comovement. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

The aim of my diploma thesis is to conduct the analysis of labour productivity with the connection to business cycle phases and their aspects. The analysis is concerned about the evaluations of measuring the labour productivity, these evaluations are important to do for better insight to their problematic. Also, the analysis deals with the factors that affect the effectivity of using factors of production. The thesis is divided into two parts - theoretical and practical. The theoretical part deals with the problematics of labour productivity, economic growth and their interconnection according to the technical literature. The market development and especially the development of insurance market, and prescribed indemnity are analysed in the practical part of the thesis. It is important to say that indemnity and its development are the essential parts of the insurance market. Also, the practical part is concerned with the labour productivity and the commission for insurance agents. The insurance company Generali is described there. The problematics of labour productivity and activity are observed on the specific groups of workers in this join-stock company. There are chosen workers from their individual positions on which the indexes are better shown. I evaluate these indicators and create a proposal for improving the labour productivity. This proposal makes also a good contribution to the direction of insurance company and its manager. The improvements include for instance: the focusing not only on newcomers but also on existing agents, who have done a good job for the company in the past and they create a good reputation for its business; a subsequent improvement is the better motivation for newcomer workers. I suggest that these newcomers should be bound to one existing insurance agent. Thanks to this it could be a good motivation and professional development for existing insurance agents, who would not only teach newcomers but above all improve themselves.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo verificar se a política fiscal brasileira influencia a política monetária por meio do impacto nas variações do hiato do produto. Dentro desse contexto, será avaliado qual foi o comportamento cíclico da política fiscal no ciclo de negócios. Para isto, será usado a metodologia da OCDE de decomposição do saldo orçamentário no saldo ciclicamente ajustado (política discricionária) e no saldo cíclico (estabilizadores fiscais). A metodologia requer a estimação de elasticidades para identificar a parte cíclica do saldo orçamentário do governo. Essa tarefa será realizada por um importante programa de seleção automática de modelos chamado Autometrics. Os resultados encontrados indicam que a política fiscal não tem atuado de maneira contra-cíclica após o estabelecimento do regime de metas de inflação. O que para o lado monetário é desfavorável, uma vez que aumenta o peso relativo do instrumento monetário (taxa de juros) quando o Banco Central objetiva reduzir as variações do hiato do produto. / The objective of this work is to verify if the Brazilian fiscal policy influences the monetary policy through output gap variation impacts. In this context, an evaluation of the behavior of the fiscal policy in the business cycle is done. In order to it, the OCDE methodology will be used to decompose the budget balance in the cyclically-adjusted budget balance (discretionary policy) and cyclically budget balance (automatic stabilizers). The methodology requires the estimation of elasticities to identify the cyclical part of the government budget balance. This task will be done by using an important program of automatic model selection named Autometrics. The founded results indicated that the fiscal policy has not been working in a countercyclical form after the establishment of inflation target. This result is unfavorable for the monetary side because it increases the relative weight of the monetary tool (interest rate) when the Central Bank objective is to reduce the variation of output gap.

This thesis makes two main contributions to the literature. The first is to establish the existence of a capital supply channel, in particular a bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission in the UK using a clean measure of bank loan supply. In this study we exploit the revealed debt preferences of debt issuing firms by using the Becker and Ivashina (2014) fixed effects framework to isolate the impact of credit supply. By conditioning the sample on non-financial firms whose debt issuance is observed, we are able to eliminate the effects of credit demand and to isolate a clean measure for bank loan supply. In this thesis, we find that the tendency by unconstrained, non-financial firms to substitute corporate bonds for bank loans at different points of the financial cycle reflects changes in bank loan supply. We also find that the patterns of substitutability are consistent among more granular classifications of heterogeneous debt. Our results reveal that among unconstrained firms, the proportion of new bank loan issuance declines, while the proportions of corporate bonds and program debt issuance tend to increase, when faced with unfavourable credit market conditions. We then create a loan to bond substitution measure based on observed substitution behaviour of unconstrained firms. We find that this measure explains the out of sample bank loan issuance behaviour of constrained firms. As a result we conclude that the measure is able to cleanly capture changes in bank loan supply. We extend the study to examine the impact of bank loan supply on the financing, hiring and investment decisions of UK non-financial corporations. We find that bank loan supply disruptions significantly and disproportionately affect the hiring and inventory investment decisions of bank dependent firms relative to those of non-bank dependent firms. The propensity to invest or hire among bank dependent UK non-financial firms declines relative to non-bank dependent firms when bank loan supply deteriorates. Moreover, the fixed investment decisions of non-bank dependent firms tend to decline following adverse bank loan supply shocks. These results confirm the existence of a bank lending channel among UK non-financial firms, and the findings are in line with the narrow credit view of monetary policy transmission. Our second central contribution is to analyse the impact of orthogonal QE shocks, credit supply shocks, credit demand shocks, and monetary policy shocks on the aggregate debt issuance behaviour of UK non-financial firms. Using structural vector error correction models (SVECM), we show that QE shocks increase corporate bond issuance and compress term spreads, but have no effect on the policy rate. Moreover, we observe that unexpected increases in the monetary policy rate lead to a decline in corporate bonds in the short term. While credit supply shocks move aggregate bank lending and aggregate corporate bond issuance in the same direction, corporate bond issuance responds with a lag to fluctuation in credit supply. This implies that adverse credit supply shocks may produce amplified negative effects on capital supply as both corporate bonds and bank loan decline. We also establish a counterfactual for corporate bonds and bank loan issues based on our structural model. We find that the QE policies result in the Bank of England averting a decline in corporate bond issuance of between 3% and 10% during the QE period. Our findings in this thesis point towards the existence of a portfolio balance channel of QE that operates in the UK corporate bond markets during the QE period.

The aim of the thesis is to examine the relationship between the course of the business cycle and the cycle of the Hollywood film industry. In the introductory section are raised theoretical approaches to the economic cycle, which seeks to clarify the causes of decline of economic activity, and compares the different recommendations. The next section is devoted to clarify the specifics of the film industry and provides a better understanding of non-transparent processes within the industry. The analytical part tests the causal relationship between the economic situation of the individual and the Hollywood studios, based on a sample of 90 observations using the Granger causality test and VAR model. Prior to empirical testing is provided a comprehensive analysis of the industry cycles from the inception to the present and is compared to the economic activity of the country. Finally, the confirmation or refutation of dependence and the result is compared with economic theory.

This work focuses on local (complementary) currencies. Their usage and appearance throughout history indicate counter-cyclicity with Great Depression and Argentine recession in 2002 as leading examples. Also previous research of Stodder (2009) proved counter-cyclicity in usage of Swiss complementary currency WIR. However, USA at the beginning of 90' and Germany after year 2000 experienced new wave of local currencies without being accompanied by any severe crisis. Have they become pro-cyclical? I tried to answer this question empirically with simple econometric model using macroeconomic indicators as explanatory variables. Results showed that number of new local currencies is in Germany pro-cyclical which supports previous works about regional distribution of currencies in Germany. Results from USA are inconclusive but indicate rather counter-cyclicity. In both countries was proved positive correlation with amount of already working currencies.

This work deals with stabilization policy of central Government and also local governments in the Czech republic, which is in present time very important question. There was made an analysis of available data on the central Government and local Government Levels. The analysis was made on time period 2001-2011. The data were compared with GDP growth for the central Government level or tax revenue from personal income for local governments. On the basis of this data, the conclusion has been made. Central and also local governments work as a stabilizator of business cycle and the hypothesis, that state and local governments work against business cycle, was confirmed.

This thesis consists of four self-contained papers related to banking, credit markets and financial stability.    Paper [I] presents a credit market model and finds, using an agent based modeling approach, that credit crunches have a tendency to occur; even when credit markets are almost entirely transparent in the absence of external shocks. We find evidence supporting the asset deterioration hypothesis and results that emphasize the importance of accurate firm quality estimates. In addition, we find that an increase in the debt’s time to maturity, homogenous expected default rates and a conservative lending approach, reduces the probability of a credit crunch. Thus, our results suggest some up till now partially overlooked components contributing to the financial stability of an economy.     Paper [II] derives an econometric disequilibrium model for time series data. This is done by error correcting the supply of some good. The model separates between a continuously clearing market and a clearing market in the long-run such that we are able to obtain a novel test of clearing markets. We apply the model to the Swedish market for short-term business loans, and find that this market is characterized by a long-run nonmarket clearing equilibrium.    Paper [III] studies the risk-return profile of centralized and decentralized banks. We address the conditions that favor a particular lending regime while acknowledging the effects on lending and returns caused by the course of the business cycle. To analyze these issues, we develop a model which incorporates two stylized facts; (i) banks in which lendingdecisions are decentralized tend to have a lower cost associated with screening potential borrowers and (ii) decentralized decision-making may generate inefficient outcomes because of lack of coordination. Simulations are used to compare the two banking regimes. Among the results, it is found that even though a bank group where decisions are decentralizedmay end up with a portfolio of loans which is (relatively) poorly diversified between regions, the ability to effectively screen potential borrowers may nevertheless give a decentralized bank a lower overall risk in the lending portfolio than when decisions are centralized.    In Paper [IV], we argue that the practice used in the valuation of a portfolio of assets is important for the calculation of the Value at Risk. In particular, a seller seeking to liquidate a large portfolio may not face horizontal demand curves. We propose a partially new approach for incorporating this fact in the Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall measures and in an empirical illustration, we compare it to a competing approach. We find substantial differences.