Thesis advisor: Susanto Basu / Thesis advisor: Peter Ireland / This dissertation consists of three independent chapters analyzing the role that information and credit frictions play in goods and financial markets. Within these chapters, I develop dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models to study the implications of these frictions on the macroeconomy, both at the national and international level. In the first chapter, I provide a novel explanation for the observed large and persistent fluctuations in real exchange rates using a model with noisy, dispersed information among price-setting firms. Chapter two studies how entrepreneurs' attitudes towards risk affect business cycles in a framework with agency frictions between borrowers and lenders. Finally, chapter three introduces a liquidity channel in a business cycle model with agency frictions to rationalize the highly volatile behavior of default recovery rates observed in the data. Real exchange rates have been extremely volatile and persistent since the end of the Bretton Woods system. For many developed economies, real exchange rates are as volatile as nominal exchange rates, and their fluctuations exhibit a half-life in the range of three to five years. Traditional sticky-price models struggle to jointly account for these features under plausible nominal rigidities (Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan, 2002). Is it possible to reconcile, in a single framework, the enormous short-term volatility of the real exchange rate with its extremely long half-life? The first chapter of this dissertation addresses this question within a framework in which information is noisy and heterogeneous among price-setting firms. In this context, the continuing uncertainty that firms face about the state of the economy and about the beliefs of their competitors, slows down the price adjustment in response to nominal shocks, generating large and long-lived real exchange rate movements. I estimate the model using real output and output deflator data from the US and the Euro Area and show, as an out-of-sample test, that the model successfully explains the observed volatility and persistence of the Euro/Dollar real exchange rate. In a Bayesian model comparison, I show that the data strongly favor the dispersed information model relative to a sticky-price model à la Calvo. The model also accounts for the persistent effects of monetary shocks on the real exchange rate that I document using a structural vector autoregression. The second chapter, joint with Mikhail Dmitriev, studies how entrepreneurs' attitudes towards risk affect business cycles in a model with agency frictions. Entrepreneurs are inevitably exposed to non-diversified risk, which likely affects their willingness to borrow and to invest in risky projects. Nevertheless, the financial friction literature has paid little attention to how entrepreneurs' desire to take on this risk affects their investment choices in a general-equilibrium setting. Indeed, business cycle models with credit market frictions that feature idiosyncratic risk assume, for tractability, that entrepreneurs are risk neutral (Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist, 1999, BGG). In this chapter, we generalize the BGG framework to the case of entrepreneurs with constant-relative-risk-aversion preferences. In doing so, we overcome the aggregation challenges of this setup and maintain an analytically tractable, log-linear framework. Our main result is that higher risk aversion stabilizes business cycle fluctuations in response to financial shocks, such as wealth redistribution or risk shocks, without significantly affecting the dynamic responses to technology and monetary shocks. Our findings suggest that, within this class of models, the ability of financial shocks to account for a large portion of short-run output fluctuations found in previous work (e.g., Christiano, Motto, and Rostagno (2014)) crucially hinges on borrowers' risk neutrality. The third chapter, joint with Mikhail Dmitriev, examines the implications of the cyclical properties of default recovery rates for aggregate fluctuations. We document that recovery rates after default in the United States are highly volatile and strongly pro-cyclical. These facts are hard to reconcile with the existing financial friction literature. Indeed, models with limited enforceability à la Kiyotaki and Moore (1997) do not feature defaults and recovery rates in equilibrium, while agency costs models following Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999) underestimate the volatility of recovery rates by one order of magnitude. In this chapter, we extend the standard agency costs model allowing liquidation costs for creditors to depend on the tightness of the market for physical capital. Creditors do not have expertise in selling entrepreneurial assets, but when buyers are plentiful, this disadvantage is minimal. Instead when sellers are abundant, the disadvantage of being an outsider is higher. Following a negative shock, entrepreneurs sell capital and liquidation costs for creditors increase, driving down recovery rates. With higher liquidation costs, creditors cut lending and cause entrepreneurs to sell even more capital. This liquidity channel works independently from standard balance sheet effects, and amplifies the impact of financial shocks on output by up to 50 percent. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

This dissertation consists of three chapters on financial friction, misallocation and development dynamics. The first chapter considers how financial frictions and mobility distortions generate the persistence of post-reform development dynamics. I build a general equilibrium model and calibrate it to China. The mobility distortion is an occupation distortion that restricts a proportion of agents to the low-productive sector. A removal of distortions triggers the transition of the economy. Using a calibrated version of the model, the transition path displays slow convergence and mimics the patterns observed in data. The mobility distortion creates high-ability, but poor, agents before the reform. This provides a channel for financial frictions to have longer effect after the reform. Compared with the literature that uses tax distortions, the economy with mobility distortions generates slower convergence. The second chapter is a welfare analysis of the well-documented depressed migrant wage in China from a dynamic perspective. The depressed migrant wage per se attracts fewer migrant workers and lowers the migrants' consumption and the aggregate output. However, it encourages urban entrepreneurs to substitute capital for labor, relaxing the effect of financial frictions. The net effect on output and consumption depends on the stage of development. Initially, it benefits the economy by speeding up TFP growth and capital accumulation in the urban sector. In the later stage, owing to low consumption of migrants, policy intervention can increase aggregate consumption and output. The third chapter investigates why the intergenerational income mobility decreases and the inequality increase for China over the past 30 years. I propose a theoretical overlapping generation model with missing capital markets, increasing the return to human capital and increasing education cost to explain these facts. After the economic reform happens, all levels of wages go up and all families accumulate and update human capital. However, the increasing education cost and credit constraint prevent the children from rural families from accumulating human capital quickly. The urban families accumulate human capital faster than the rural families. These predictions from the model are verified in the census data. Whether this process continues or not depends on the subsidy of education. Government education policy can improve the allocation of education in the economy.

Macroeconomic events in the United States during the last ten years—the housing bubble, the financial crisis and the subsequent, deep recession—brought several puzzles to the attention of economists and policymakers. Why were there such large price booms and busts in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix, where land was readily available and construction markets were very active? Why are economies so slow to recover from recessions that coincide with financial crises? Can policymakers use fiscal stimulus to increase output and accelerate economic recovery after a recession?

This paper examines a dynamic stochastic model of a competitive industry with heterogeneous firms that allows for entry, exit and mergers of firms in equilibrium. The model we build is an extension of a modified version of Jovanovic and Rousseau's (2002) model that introduces financial frictions, describes the market for corporate control and endogenizes its equilibrium price, and develops a stationary equilibrium à la Hopenhayn (1992). It provides a theoretical framework within which to study factors affecting variables such as entry, exit and investment through direct unbundled capital good purchase and mergers. This work contributes to the literature by suggesting another explanation to many empirical regularities and describing one more mechanism through which aggregate liquidity shocks may affect merger activity. The results suggest that due to asymmetric information about entrepreneur's survival probabilities aggregate liquidity shocks may contribute to codetermine the turnover rate of firms and investment levels through mergers.

This DPhil thesis is a collection of three theoretical and empirical papers studying labor markets in several advanced economies. Two chapters examine the relationship between the banking sector and the labor market in the US and the UK, while one evaluates a policy that has been proposed to help labor markets in the Euro Area adjust to economic shocks. In the first chapter, I develop a New Keynesian DSGE model that integrates a banking sector subject to moral hazard with a standard random search model of the labor market. I estimate the model using US data and study the role of the banking sector in determining labor market fluctuations. In the second chapter, I estimate a structural VAR model of the UK and US economies and identify bank lending shocks using a mix of sign and short-run exclusion restrictions. Consistent with the predictions of the DSGE model, an expansionary loan supply shock decreases job-destruction and increases job-creation, reducing the unemployment rate persistently. Bank lending shocks are also important drivers of labor market fluctuations, particularly during the Great Recession. Lastly, in the third chapter, I calibrate to the Euro Area a currency union DSGE model to evaluate the aggregate properties of European Unemployment Insurance (EUI). I find that EUI cannot contemporaneously stabilize the monetary union and achieve convergence in regional unemployment and inflation rates.

Cette thèse aborde différents sujets ayant trait aux liens entre l’économie réelle et l’économie financière au sein de l’économie internationale. Trois essais abordent ces liens selon différentes perspectives aussi bien micro que macro-économiques. Le premier chapitre, co-écrit avec Jean-Charles Bricongne et Sebastian Franco-Bedoya, évalue l’arbitrage proximité-concentration avec des entreprises multi-produits afin d’identifier le type de lien (complémentarité ou substituabilité) entre les exportations et les IDE. Tandis que les modèles d’IDE horizontal prédisent qu’IDE et exportations se substituent du fait de l’arbitrage proximité-concentration, une majorité d’études empiriques met en évidence leur complémentarité. [...]Le deuxième chapitre examine empiriquement le rôle du développement financier dans l’évolution du produit marginal du capital (MPK) dans 50 pays et sa relation avec leurs besoins de finance externe, en lien avec leur production manufacturière durant la période 1995-2008. En se fondant sur des données sectorielles au niveau des pays, les résultats de ce chapitre montrent que la spécialisation dans des secteurs intensifs en finance externe contribue de manière positive au MPK des pays développés et de manière négative dans les pays en développement. Cette relation devient légèrement positive uniquement lorsque le système financier est suffisamment développé dans ces derniers ; ces pays étant généralement caractérisés par des systèmes financiers largement moins efficaces en comparaison avec des pays développés. [...] Le troisième chapitre, co-écrit avec Jean-Charles Bricongne et Fabrizio Coricelli étudie la transmission des chocs mondiaux pendant la Grande Récession et son impact sur l’emploi français. En particulier, nous examinons le rôle du crédit commercial (ou inter-entreprises) dans la propagation des chocs transfrontaliers. En se fondant sur un sous-échantillon des entreprises importatrices économiquement actives sur la période 2004-2009, nos résultats suggèrent que des entreprises ayant de forts liens commerciaux avant la crise avec les pays qui ont le mieux résisté aux chocs économiques, ont eu une meilleure performance au niveau de la croissance de l’emploi entre 2008 et 2009. Cet effet varie considérablement en fonction de l’intensité du crédit commercial. Une forte dépendance au crédit commercial avant la crise s’est traduite par une vulnérabilité plus forte aux chocs imprévus pour les entreprises, pour lesquelles l’impact négatif de la crise a été exacerbé. Cet effet a été intensifié pour les entreprises ayant des liens commerciaux importants avec les pays les plus affectés par des chocs. A l’inverse, l’effet négatif de la crise a été atténué lorsque les relations commerciales étaient plus fortes avec des pays où les chocs ont été les moins sévères. Suggérant par conséquent, que le crédit commercial a été une source alternative de financement pour les entreprises françaises importatrices lors de la crise, du moment où leurs fournisseurs internationaux leur ont permis de surmonter les contraintes financières liées aux chocs imprévus en leur accordant un délai de paiement plus important. Les résultats de cette analyse contribuent au débat dans la littérature sur le rôle du financement du commerce international dans le ralentissement de l’activité économique réelle à travers les frontières. / Two particular concerns in international economics motivate this research: I. How are real and financial activities related to each other in a globalized economy? II. What role do financial frictions play in this relationship ? Three essays look at these questions from different perspectives. The first chapter, in collaboration with Jean-Charles Bricongne and SebastianFranco-Bedoya, revises the old question on the relation between FDI and exports on French firms, where theory seems to be at odds with empirical findings. Most FDI and most trade take place between rich markets, where the horizontal investment type is expected to happen. In this sense, empirical studies have almost invariably found a complementarity relation while standard Horizontal FDI models predict substitutability between FDI and exports given the proximity-concentration trade-off. [...]The second chapter empirically examines how external financial needs measured at the sector level- and financial development at the country level interact to shape the aggregate marginal product of capital of a country (MPK) and its foreign direct investment inflows (FDI). First, using new available data we construct annual aggregate MPK for 50 developing and developed countries during 1995-2008; we use industry-level data to construct an annual country-level measure of external financial dependence and assess its effects on MPK conditional on the level of financial development. Our findings imply that financial development seems to be a necessary condition -and certainly not a sufficient one- in order for production in financially dependent sectors to positively affect aggregate MPK in developing countries. Second, using bilateral FDI inflows in developing countries between 2001 and 2010, we analyze how external financial dependence and financial development determine FDI in flows in developing countries. [...]The third chapter, joint research with Jean-Charles Bricongne and Fabrizio Coricelli, studies the transmission of global shocks during the Great Recession and its impact on French employment. Particularly, we explore the role of trade credit in the propagation of cross-border shocks. Using a sub-sample of importing enterprises that were active over 2004-2009,our findings imply that strong pre-crisis sourcing ties with countries that were more resilient to the global crisis, translated into better performance in terms of employment growth over 2008-2009. This effect dramatically varies with trade credit intensity. Strongly relying on trade credit made firms more vulnerable to unanticipated shocks, for which the adverse impact of the crisis was exacerbated. This effect intensified among firms with important sourcing ties with severely shocked countries. While the negative effect of the crisis was mitigated when sourcing relations with countries subject to milder shocks were stronger. Supporting, therefore, the hypothesis that trade credit was an alternative source of financing for enterprises during the crisis, where implicitly borrowing from suppliers helped importers overcoming financial constraints. Our contribution to the literature adds to the debate on the role of trade finance in explaining the real economic downturn across borders.

L’interaction sphère financière/sphère réelle a longtemps été délaissée dans les modèles macroéconomiques, postulant généralement la neutralité de la première. La récente crise financière dite des subprime démontre qu’il en est autrement. Cette thèse propose trois essais sur le rôle du secteur financier et plus particulièrement bancaire à l’aune de la dernière crise.Le premier consiste à donner un cadre formel à la nature exceptionnelle de la crise en abandonnant l’hypothèse de normalité des ‘événements résiduels’. Nos résultats réfutent le caractère ‘normal’ de la crise mais, aussi et surtout, soulignent les biais en termes de diagnostics économiques à la considérer comme telle.Par ailleurs, un des effets exceptionnels de cette crise a été le recours à des politiques monétaires non conventionnelles. La deuxième partie de la thèse suggère à ce titre l’incertitude sur les marchés interbancaires comme une raison probable de l’inefficacité des politiques monétaires conventionnelles. Une politique monétaire équilibrée entre lutte contre l'inflation et soutien à l'économie réelle serait néanmoins plus à même de réduire les effets de cette incertitude sur le cycle économique.Enfin, le troisième volet de la thèse propose une étude d’impact de la nouvelle réglementation Bâle III sur le secteur réel. L’absence d’externalités positives entre la mise en œuvre de la contrainte de capitalisation et celle du LCR accentue davantage l’écart de production entre PME et grandes entreprises, induisant un impact récessif global encore plus sensible. Une mise en œuvre plus lente et parfaitement annoncée des nouvelles normes réglementaires pourrait néanmoins nuancer ces effets. / Until recently, most macroeconomic models have ignored the interaction between financial and real sectors, postulating the neutrality of the former. However, the last financial crisis, also known as subprime crisis, rejected this assumption. In this thesis we propose three essays where we try to shed light on the role of the financial and more particularly the banking sector during the last crisis.The first essay provides a formal assessment of the exceptional nature of the crisis by challenging the usual ‘normality’ assumption of the innovations. Our results refute the ‘normality’ assumption for the crisis, but also and more importantly, they put forward possible biases from using this assumption in macroeconometric models.The exceptional features of the crisis can also be seen in the use of unconventional monetary policy. The second chapter of the thesis shows how higher volatility in the interbank market impedes the standard monetary policy effects. However, a central bank with a more balanced monetary policy, reacting both to inflation pressures and to GDP variations, would be in a better situation to dampen the effects of interbank volatility shocks on the economic cycle.The last chapter deals with the impact on the real sector of the new Basel III regulatory requirements. The fulfillment of the new capital ratio has no positive spill-over effects on the Liquidity Coverage Ratio which magnifies the output discrepancy between SMEs and corporate firms. This, in turn, generates a greater recessionary impact on the overall economy. A more progressive implementation of the new regulation combined with perfect expectations should however decrease such adverse effects.

abstract: The dissertation consists of three essays that deal with variations in economic growth and development across space and time. The essays in particular explore the importance of differences in occupational structures in various settings. The first chapter documents that intergenerational occupational persistence is significantly higher in poor countries even after controlling for cross-country differences in occupational structures. Based on this empirical fact, I posit that high occupational persistence in poor countries is symptomatic of underlying talent misallocation. Constraints on education financing force sons to choose fathers' occupations over the occupations of their comparative advantage. A version of Roy (1951) model of occupational choice is developed to quantify the impact of occupational misallocation on aggregate productivity. I find that output per worker reduces to a third of the benchmark US economy for the country with the highest level of occupational persistence. In the second chapter, I use occupational prestige as a proxy of social status to estimate intergenerational occupational mobility for 50 countries spanning the breadth of world's income distribution for both sons and daughters. I find that although relative mobility varies significantly across countries, the correlation between relative mobility and GDP per capita is only mildly positive for sons and is close to zero for daughters. I also consider two measures of absolute mobility: the propensity to move across quartiles and the propensity to move relative to father's occupational prestige. Similar to relative mobility, the first measure of absolute mobility is uncorrelated with GDP per capita. The second measure, however, is positively correlated with GDP per capita with correlations being significantly higher for sons compared to daughters. The third chapter analyses to what extent the growth in productivity witnessed by India during 1983--2004 can be explained by a better allocation of workers across occupations. I first document that the propensity to work in high-skilled occupations relative to high-caste men increased manifold for high-caste women, low-caste men and low-caste women during this period. Given that innate talent in these occupations is likely to be independent across groups, the chapter argues that the occupational distribution in the 1980s represented talent misallocation in which workers from many groups faced significant barriers to practice an occupation of their comparative advantage. I find that these barriers can explain 15--21\% of the observed growth in output per worker during the period from 1983--2004. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Economics 2015

Cette thèse aborde différentes thématiques dans le champ de l’économie internationale et de la macroéconomie. Les travaux de recherche développés dans cette thèse étudient l’impact des chocs de différentes natures sur les flux de migrations internationales, de commerce international et sur la croissance de la productivité. Le premier chapitre s’intéresse à l’évolution des flux migratoires en réaction à des chocs conjoncturels. L’estimation du modèle à partir des données nous permet de conclure qu’à la fois les chocs structurels et les chocs conjoncturels influent les flux de migration. Une augmentation de 10% du salaire du pays de destination conduirait à une augmentation du flux migratoire vers ce pays de destination de près de 8%, toutes choses égales par ailleurs. Le second chapitre étudie dans quelles mesures les chocs financiers affectent le niveau des exportations des entreprises, avec un focus particulier sur les entreprises qui exportent vers des destinations lointaines. Nous trouvons que les entreprises qui font face à des frictions financières exportent entre 4% et 10% de moins que celles qui ne sont pas soumises à ces frictions. Nos résultats montrent également que parmi les exportateurs en difficulté financière, ceux qui exportent vers des destinations lointaines réduisent encore davantage leurs exportations. Dans le chapitre trois, nous étudions comment les frictions financières peuvent conduire à des distorsions dans l’allocation des ressources. Nos résultats suggèrent que dans les pays développés financièrement, les capitaux ne permettent pas forcément une amélioration de l’allocation efficace du travail entre les firmes. / This thesis covers various issues in international economics and macroeconomics.It studies the role of several types of shocks on international migration, firms’ export strategies and sectoral productivity growth. The three chapters exploit different sources of data and use recent econometrics approaches to deal with these issues.Chapter one contributes to the literature on international migration by looking at the role of short-run fluctuations as determinants of the location choice of the migrants. We find evidence that business cycles and employment rates at destination affect the intensity of gross bilateral flows.Chapter two investigates how financial frictions impact firms’ foreign sales, especially for firms that export to long distance export markets. We find that firmsfacing financial frictions export from 4 to 10% less than the ones without anyfinancial constraints. Our results also suggest that amongst exporters facing financial difficulties, those who export to faraway destinations reduce their exportsales more.Chapter three investigates how financial frictions affect the efficiency with which labor allocates across firms within a sector. Results suggest that an increase intangibility decreases the productivity growth rate of an industry located in highly financially developed country and this lower productivity growth rate is largely explained by the reallocation of labour across firms within the sector.

Dans cette thèse, l'objectif de mes recherches, s'inscrivant dans la lignée de la littérature qui donne un rôle prééminent aux intermédiaires financiers dans les modèles macroéconomiques,consiste à comprendre les mécanismes qui ont permis à l'intermédiation financière imparfaite et parfaite d'affecter la dynamique de l'économie et la transmission de la politique monétaire, et de fournir une nouvelle formulation théorique pour l'évaluation de la politique monétaire non conventionnelle. Pour ce faire, j'ai d'abord considéré l'impact de l'intermédiation financière sur l'analyse des effets de la transparence de la banque centrale (chapitre 2). Dans le chapitre 3, je me suis concentré sur le rôle joué par l'intermédiation financière imparfaite et les frictions financières dans la transmission des chocs : par quels mécanismes, la présence d'intermédiaires financiers contraints par leur bilan affecte l'effet des chocs sur la macroéconomie? Enfin, dans le quatrième chapitre, je construis un modèle théorique pour analyser une question importante : le mécanisme de transmission des effets de l'achat à grande échelle de la banque centrale de titres adossés, qui n'a pas été effectué dans la littérature existante. / In this dissertation, my research aims at dwelling on the questions, at understanding and explaining -- as a follow of current strand of literature on financial frictions -- the mechanisms that allowed the imperfect and perfect credit intermediation to affect the dynamics of economy and the transmission of monetary policy, and providing a new theoretical formulation for evaluating the unconventional monetary policy. To do this, I first considered the impact of financial intermediation on the analysis of central bank transparency issue (Chapter 2). ln Chapter 3, I focused on the role played by the imperfect financial intermediation/financial frictions in the transmission of shocks : through which mechanisms, do the presence of balance-sheet constraint financial intermediaries affect the effect of shocks on the macroeconomy? Finally, in Chapter 4, 1 construct an theoreticalmodel to analyze an important issue which have net been carried out in existing literature: the transmission mechanism of the central bank's large-scale purchase of mortgage-backed securities. ln this chapter, I first simulated a financial crisis to see if the model is able to replicate some of the most important stylized facts of the Great Recession. Then, basing on the simulated crisis, I examine the efficacy and transmission mechanism of large scale purchases of MBS through comparing these purchases to the purchases of corporate bonds. This experiment is conducted in two credit market configurations, i.e., a partially and a totally segmented credit market. The latter case of market condition is considered by many economists as main obstacle that impedes the nominal functioning of the financial markets. ln this work, we have obtained rich and important findings for guiding the use of unconventional monetary policy. The following parts briefly present the findinqs of the thesis.