In this dissertation, two questions concerning monetary policy under the Taylor rule have been addressed. The first question is on, under the Taylor rule, whether a central bank should be responsible for both bank supervision and monetary policy or whether the two tasks should be exercised by separate institutions. This is the main focus of Chapter I. The second question is on whether the Taylor rule plays an important role in explaining modern business cycles in the United States. The second question has been covered by Chapter II. The implications of the first chapter can be summarized as follows: (i) it is inevitable for the central bank to have a systematic error in conducting monetary policy when the central bank does not have a bank supervisory role; (ii) without a bank supervisory role, the effectiveness of monetary policy cannot be guaranteed; (iii) because of the existence of conflict of interests, giving a bank supervisory role to the central bank does not guarantee the effectiveness of monetary policy, either; (iv) the way of setting up another government agency, bank regulator, and making the central bank and the regulator cooperate each other does not guarantee the effectiveness of monetary policy because, in this way, the systematic error in conducting monetary policy cannot be eliminated; (v) in the view of social welfare, not in the view of the effectiveness of monetary policy, it is better for the central bank to keep the whole responsibility or at least a partial responsibility on bank supervision. In the second chapter, we examined the effect of a technology shock and a money shock in the context of an RBC model incorporating the Taylor rule as the Fed??s monetary policy. One thing significantly different from other researches on this topic is the way the Taylor rule is introduced in the model. In this chapter, the Taylor rule is introduced by considering the relationship among the Fisher equation, Euler equation and the Taylor rule explicitly in the dynamic system of the relevant RBC model. With this approach, it has been shown that, even in a flexible-price environment, the two major failures in RBC models with money can be resolved. Under the Taylor rule, the correlation between output and inflation appears to be positive and the response of our model economy to a shock is persistent. Furthermore, the possibility of an existing liquidity effect is found. These results imply that the Taylor rule does play a key role in explaining business cycles in the United States.

The human society exerts its influence on the ecosystem through economic activities. While the robustness of an economy manifests through its industrial structure, human impact on nature is well represented by an economy's energy consumption patterns. Therefore, evaluating the industrial structure and unraveling its interconnection with energy consumption is crucial for achieving sustainable development. In this dissertation, I address the topic from several perspectives. First, I start with an exploratory analysis on the industrial structure itself, developing an easy measure, revealed comparative dependence (RCD), to compare regional dependence on sectors. Building on the RCD measure, I indirectly evaluate the economic resilience of U.S. states by quantifying their economic diversity. Second, I bring the measure for industrial structure into context with energy consumption patterns. RCD is used to characterize sector interactions, which are then used to explain the historical trend of regional energy consumption. I find that while the expansion of low energy intensity sectors does reduce energy use, these sectors' level of interaction with other sectors also plays a key role in determining energy use. As a third step, I investigate how regional structure affects an economy's response towards energy efficiency improvements, i.e., the economy-wide rebound effect. My regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) model proves that production-side energy efficiency improvement induces moderate rebound effects, while feeding back into the industrial structure by changing sectoral production scale in different directions. I also identify sectors being able to trigger different levels of energy saving and energy rebound, and explore the mechanism for their impact propagation throughout the industrial structure. This study establishes the linkage between regional industrial structure and energy consumption from different perspectives. From the scientific perspective, it improves the fundamental understanding of how industrial structure and energy consumption are intricately connected to each other. From the policy perspective, it informs policy makers of the importance of considering sector interaction when designing energy policies, as well as the effectiveness of efficiency measures in achieving energy conservation.

No description available.

The economic impacts of a government-funded, forest-based sequestration program were analyzed under two different payment schemes. The impacts were obtained by developing a regional, static CGE model built to accommodate a modified IMPLAN SAM for a determined region in the United States for 2008. The IMPLAN SAM was modified to accommodate the more conventional factors of production (labor, capital and land) and to account for land heterogeneity using the Major Land Resource Areas (MLRA). The regional aggregation considered included the Southern, Northeastern, Southwestern and Midwestern regions. The two policy scenarios considered consisted of two CO2-offset payment schemes: 1) the government compensates the generation of CO2-offsets only by the land converted to a carbon graveyard and 2) the government additionally compensates the CO2 offsets generated as a by-product by the existing commercial logging activity. By doing an analysis of the model with different budget magnitudes under the two scenarios, two different CO2-offset supply schedules were obtained with their respective CO2-offset price and quantity sets. For a budget allocation of $6.9 billion, approximately 1 billion metric tons of CO2 offsets (15% of U.S. 2008 total GHG emissions) were produced in the first scenario versus 0.8 billion metric tons (11% of U.S. 2008 GHG net emissions) in the second one. Fifty million acres were diverted out of agriculture and commercial forestry land to the carbon graveyard mainly in the Northern, Western and Central Great Plains in the first scenario. Twenty two million acres were diverted out of agricultural land to the carbon graveyard and commercial logging mainly in the Northern and Western Great Plains; and the Eastern and Western boundaries of the Appalachian Mountains in the second scenario. Both scenarios resulted in higher land and agricultural commodity prices, lower consumption of agricultural commodities by households, lower agricultural exports and higher imports. The payment structure of the second scenario benefited the commercial logging industry, increasing its production and exports, and decreasing its imports. The non-agricultural sectors mostly impacted by the two policy scenarios were the manufacturing, construction and government employment sectors.

This paper studies the cost effectiveness of climate policy if there are technology externalities. For this purpose, we develop a forward-looking CGE model that captures empirical links between CO2 emissions associated with energy use, directed technical change and the economy. We find the cost-effective climate policy to include a combination of R&D subsidies and CO2 emission constraints, although R&D subsidies raise the shadow value of the CO2 constraint (i.e. CO2 price) because of a strong rebound effect from stimulating innovation. Furthermore, we find that CO2 constraints differentiated toward CO2-intensive sectors are more cost effective than constraints that generate uniform CO2 prices among sectors. Differentiated CO2 prices, through technical change and concomitant technology externalities, encourage growth in the non-CO2 intensive sectors and discourage growth in CO2-intensive sectors. Thus, it is cost effective to let the latter bear relatively more of the abatement burden. This result is robust to whether emission constraints, R&D subsidies or combinations of both are used to reduce CO2 emissions. / Abstract in HTML and technical report in PDF available on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://mit.edu/globalchange/www/).

The thesis sheds light on key policy issues emerging from the recent Global Financial Crisis. The first chapter studies whether expansionary monetary policy contributes to bank risk-taking, in the case of Asia. I rely on panel data analysis covering 432 banks in 9 Asian countries over the year 2000-2011. The ratio of risky assets to total assets serves as a risk-taking indicator. The results support the existence of the bank risk-taking channel, which is more pronounced for banks listed on the stock market. I also report new findings with respect to how banks take more risk following monetary expansion. Importantly, evidence of excessive leverage is not found. The second chapter constructs a model for analyzing bank risk-taking. I embed firm heterogeneity, endogenous default risk and capital adequacy regulation into both RBC and NK DSGE models. A subset of the firms can partially default on their loans obligation but subject to non-pecuniary default penalty. With those financial frictions in place, I find that standard macroeconomic shocks can induce banks to engage in higher risk-taking. The chapter then explores the effectiveness of several macro-prudential tools in mitigating risk-taking. I find countercyclical capital buffers and risky to total asset ratio targeting to be effective. The third chapter emphasises the spillover effects of shocks originating in the housing and financial market on the real economy. I embed endogenous mortgage default into a New Keynesian model that features housing and the banking sector. The latter faces capital regulation. We study two key shocks, namely shocks to the variance of idiosyncratic housing shock and shocks to the penalty on capital regulation. Both are instrumental in causing a surge in mortgage default and loans risk premium, which constrains bank lending activity. The chapter later introduces three macroprudential measures to explore whether they improve economic stability and welfare.

This work exploits the general equilibrium modeling framework to simulate complex systems, an economy and an ecosystem. In an economic application, this work leverages a novel data revision scheme to integrate technological detail on electricity generation and pollution abatement into national accounts data in a traditional economic computed general equilibrium (CGE) model. This integration provides a rich characterization of generation and abatement for multiple fuel sources and pollutants across 72 different generation-abatement technology configurations. Results reveal that the benefits of reductions in oxides of nitrogen and sulfur from a carbon policy in the US electric sector are on the order of $10 bn., which rival the policy's welfare costs and make 12-13% carbon abatement economically justifiable without considering any climate benefits. For ecosystem applications, this work demonstrates how the structure of economic CGE modeling can be adapted to construct a Biological General Equilibrium (BGE) model grounded in the theoretical biology literature. The BGE model contributes a novel synthesis of micro-behavioral, bioenergetic features with macroscopic ecosystem outcomes and empirical food web data. Species respond to prevailing ecosystem scarcity conditions that impinge on their energy budgets driving population outcomes within and across model periods. This adaptive capacity is a critical advance over the commonly-taken phenomenological or first-order parametric approaches. The distinctive design of the BGE model enables numerical examination of how changes in scarcity drives biomass production and consumption in a complex food web. Moreover, the BGE model design can exploit empirical datasets used by extant ecosystem models to offer this level of insight for a wide cast of ecosystems. Monte carlo simulations demonstrate that the BGE framework can produce stable results for the ecosystem robust to a variety of shocks and parameterizations. The BGE model's validity is supported in tests against real-world phenomena within the Aleutian ecosystem - both an invasive species and a harvesting-induced trophic cascade - by mimicking key features of these phenomena. The BGE model's micro-founded dynamics, the stability and robustness of its results, and its validity against real-world phenomena offer a unique and valuable contribution to ecosystem modeling and a way forward for the integrated assessment of human-ecosystem interactions.

Alterações na legislação tributária sempre motivaram profundas discussões políticas e acadêmicas. Isso ocorre pois mudanças dessa natureza promovem a realocação dos fatores de produção, alterando a produção de setores e regiões, e, consequentemente, da receita arrecadada pelos governos. Essa última, por sua vez, é alterada por duas motivações: as variações das alíquotas e as da própria base tributária. O sistema tributário brasileiro, ao longo do tempo, passou por constantes reformulações buscando torná-lo mais moderno e adequado às condições econômicas e políticas vigentes. Entretanto, atualmente, diferentemente do que ocorreu no passado, não é mais possível prover reformas tributárias lastreadas no aumento da carga, uma vez que essa já assume patamares incompatíveis com o grau de desenvolvimento do País. Nesse cenário, apresenta-se a PEC nº 233/08, a mais recente proposta de reforma tributária que, buscando manter inalterada a carga tributária no patamar atual, propõe, entre outras mudanças, modificações relevantes na legislação do ICMS. Esse projeto de emenda constitucional propõe a harmonização da legislação do ICMS e a preservação do sistema misto de apropriação do imposto entre origem e destino, aumentando significativamente, porém, a apropriação pelo destino. Dada a necessidade de uma abordagem empírica para as discussões, essa tese, com o objetivo de estimar os impactos decorrentes dessa proposta de reforma, utilizou um modelo de equilíbrio geral computável inter-regional denominado BMARIA- RS-TAX (ano-base 2004), que investigou as relações econômicas entre o Rio Grande do Sul e o Restante do Brasil. Para tanto, dois experimentos são implementados. O primeiro trata especificamente de uma reestruturação tributária para o Rio Grande do Sul em que um desconto de ICMS relativo a 1% da arrecadação total em um produto é financiado via aumento da alíquota efetiva dos demais. O experimento mostrou que mudanças na matriz tributária gaúcha não se mostram nem economicamente nem fiscalmente neutras, tanto no curto quanto no longo prazo. Esse tipo de simulação é fundamental para determinar o posicionamento do Estado no caso das rodadas de discussão no Confaz quanto à alocação dos produtos nas faixas de alíquotas pré-definidas pelo Senado, pois evidencia os efeitos de aumentar a alíquota em um determinado setor e reduzir em outro. O segundo experimento aplica a proposta da PEC nº 233/08, assumindo que a harmonização se dará através da assimilação da alíquota efetiva média vigente no País em ambas as regiões analisadas. Os resultados mostraram que a harmonização leva a um aumento relevante da alíquota efetiva média no Rio Grande do Sul, com impactos negativos sobre o PIB e o emprego, porém com aumento significativo da arrecadação (com resultados opostos no Restante do Brasil). No entanto, esse resultado em termos de receita do Estado tem seu efeito diminuído em virtude da mudança do regramento do regime de apropriação do ICMS. Ainda assim, mesmo que potencialmente menor, o resultado revela, no caso do Rio Grande do Sul, um incremento na arrecadação em comparação com a arrecadação corrente. No entanto, é provável que isso não se materialize integralmente em ganhos de caixa para o Estado, dado que a reforma prevê mecanismos de compensação entre “ganhadores” e “perdedores” com a reforma. A temporalidade e os próprios mecanismos da reforma não atentam para questões econômicas, mas apenas fiscais. Os resultados da análise de equilíbrio geral computável mostram que, para o Rio Grande de Sul, a reforma pode gerar efeitos perversos sobre a atividade econômica e sobre as finanças públicas se os mecanismos de compensação de receita exaurirem o potencial ganho fiscal identificado para o Rio Grande do Sul. Neste caso, o Rio Grande do Sul perderia duplamente no processo de reforma. / Changes in the tributary legislation have always brought deep discussions into politics and the academic field. This happens because changes in this matter promote the reallocation of production factors, altering the production of sectors and regions and, thus, the production of revenues collected by the governments. The latter, therefore, altered by two reasons: the variations of the tax rate and the ones of the tributary bases themselves. The Brazilian tributary system, along the years, has gone through constant reformulations trying to become more modern and adequate to the current economic and political conditions. However, nowadays, different from what had occurred in the past, it is not possible to provide reforms based on tax load, since it has already reached incompatible standards compared with the country’s development level. In this scenario, it is presented the PEC 233/08, the most recent proposal of tributary reform that tries to keep unchanged the current tax load level; it proposes, among other changes, relevant modifications in the ICMS (Value Added Tax – VAT) legislation. This project of constitutional amendment proposes a harmonic legislation of ICMS and the preservation of mixed system of appropriation of taxes between the origin and the destination, increasing significantly, however, the appropriation of the destination. As it is needed an empiric approach for discussions, this thesis, which had the objective to estimate the impact derived from this proposal of reform, used a interregional computable general equilibrium (ICGE) model named BMARIA-RS-TAX, (database 2004), that investigated the economic relations between Rio Grande do Sul and the rest of Brazil. In order to carry out this research two experiments are implemented. The first deals specifically with tributary restructuring for Rio Grande do Sul, in which 1% discount in the ICMS total revenue of one product is financed by the effective increase on other products tax rates. The experiment showed that the changes in the tributary model of Rio Grande do Sul were neither economically nor fiscally neutral in short and long term period. This kind of simulation is essential to determine the positioning of the state in the rounds of discussions at Confaz as for allocating the products in the range of pre-determined tax rates by the Senate, because it shows evidences of increasing taxes in one specific sector and deceasing in another. The second experiment applied the proposal of PEC 233/08, assuming that the harmonization will be done through the assimilation of the current effective tax rate average in the country in both analyzed regions. The results showed the harmonization leads to a significant increase in the effective tax rate average in Rio Grande do Sul, which had negative impact in the GDP and employment rate; although, there were significant increases in the tax revenue collected in Rio Grande do Sul (the opposite results were also found for the rest of the country). However, in terms of revenue for the state, this result has its effects diminished due to the changing of rules of ICMS approval regime. Nevertheless, even being potentially smaller, the results show the increase in the revenues collection in comparison to the current revenue income. However, it is likely that this will not be materialized thoroughly in gains for the cash flow of the state, since the legislation provides mechanisms of compensation for ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ with the reform. The temporality and the reform’s own mechanisms do not draw attention to economic matters, but to fiscal ones. The result of the a interregional computable general equilibrium (ICGE) model analysis shows that, for Rio Grande do Sul, the reform can generate harsh results on the economic activities and on the public finances if mechanisms of income compensation blow over the potential of fiscal gains identified in Rio Grande do Sul. In this case, the state would lose twice in the process of reform.

Alterações na legislação tributária sempre motivaram profundas discussões políticas e acadêmicas. Isso ocorre pois mudanças dessa natureza promovem a realocação dos fatores de produção, alterando a produção de setores e regiões, e, consequentemente, da receita arrecadada pelos governos. Essa última, por sua vez, é alterada por duas motivações: as variações das alíquotas e as da própria base tributária. O sistema tributário brasileiro, ao longo do tempo, passou por constantes reformulações buscando torná-lo mais moderno e adequado às condições econômicas e políticas vigentes. Entretanto, atualmente, diferentemente do que ocorreu no passado, não é mais possível prover reformas tributárias lastreadas no aumento da carga, uma vez que essa já assume patamares incompatíveis com o grau de desenvolvimento do País. Nesse cenário, apresenta-se a PEC nº 233/08, a mais recente proposta de reforma tributária que, buscando manter inalterada a carga tributária no patamar atual, propõe, entre outras mudanças, modificações relevantes na legislação do ICMS. Esse projeto de emenda constitucional propõe a harmonização da legislação do ICMS e a preservação do sistema misto de apropriação do imposto entre origem e destino, aumentando significativamente, porém, a apropriação pelo destino. Dada a necessidade de uma abordagem empírica para as discussões, essa tese, com o objetivo de estimar os impactos decorrentes dessa proposta de reforma, utilizou um modelo de equilíbrio geral computável inter-regional denominado BMARIA- RS-TAX (ano-base 2004), que investigou as relações econômicas entre o Rio Grande do Sul e o Restante do Brasil. Para tanto, dois experimentos são implementados. O primeiro trata especificamente de uma reestruturação tributária para o Rio Grande do Sul em que um desconto de ICMS relativo a 1% da arrecadação total em um produto é financiado via aumento da alíquota efetiva dos demais. O experimento mostrou que mudanças na matriz tributária gaúcha não se mostram nem economicamente nem fiscalmente neutras, tanto no curto quanto no longo prazo. Esse tipo de simulação é fundamental para determinar o posicionamento do Estado no caso das rodadas de discussão no Confaz quanto à alocação dos produtos nas faixas de alíquotas pré-definidas pelo Senado, pois evidencia os efeitos de aumentar a alíquota em um determinado setor e reduzir em outro. O segundo experimento aplica a proposta da PEC nº 233/08, assumindo que a harmonização se dará através da assimilação da alíquota efetiva média vigente no País em ambas as regiões analisadas. Os resultados mostraram que a harmonização leva a um aumento relevante da alíquota efetiva média no Rio Grande do Sul, com impactos negativos sobre o PIB e o emprego, porém com aumento significativo da arrecadação (com resultados opostos no Restante do Brasil). No entanto, esse resultado em termos de receita do Estado tem seu efeito diminuído em virtude da mudança do regramento do regime de apropriação do ICMS. Ainda assim, mesmo que potencialmente menor, o resultado revela, no caso do Rio Grande do Sul, um incremento na arrecadação em comparação com a arrecadação corrente. No entanto, é provável que isso não se materialize integralmente em ganhos de caixa para o Estado, dado que a reforma prevê mecanismos de compensação entre “ganhadores” e “perdedores” com a reforma. A temporalidade e os próprios mecanismos da reforma não atentam para questões econômicas, mas apenas fiscais. Os resultados da análise de equilíbrio geral computável mostram que, para o Rio Grande de Sul, a reforma pode gerar efeitos perversos sobre a atividade econômica e sobre as finanças públicas se os mecanismos de compensação de receita exaurirem o potencial ganho fiscal identificado para o Rio Grande do Sul. Neste caso, o Rio Grande do Sul perderia duplamente no processo de reforma. / Changes in the tributary legislation have always brought deep discussions into politics and the academic field. This happens because changes in this matter promote the reallocation of production factors, altering the production of sectors and regions and, thus, the production of revenues collected by the governments. The latter, therefore, altered by two reasons: the variations of the tax rate and the ones of the tributary bases themselves. The Brazilian tributary system, along the years, has gone through constant reformulations trying to become more modern and adequate to the current economic and political conditions. However, nowadays, different from what had occurred in the past, it is not possible to provide reforms based on tax load, since it has already reached incompatible standards compared with the country’s development level. In this scenario, it is presented the PEC 233/08, the most recent proposal of tributary reform that tries to keep unchanged the current tax load level; it proposes, among other changes, relevant modifications in the ICMS (Value Added Tax – VAT) legislation. This project of constitutional amendment proposes a harmonic legislation of ICMS and the preservation of mixed system of appropriation of taxes between the origin and the destination, increasing significantly, however, the appropriation of the destination. As it is needed an empiric approach for discussions, this thesis, which had the objective to estimate the impact derived from this proposal of reform, used a interregional computable general equilibrium (ICGE) model named BMARIA-RS-TAX, (database 2004), that investigated the economic relations between Rio Grande do Sul and the rest of Brazil. In order to carry out this research two experiments are implemented. The first deals specifically with tributary restructuring for Rio Grande do Sul, in which 1% discount in the ICMS total revenue of one product is financed by the effective increase on other products tax rates. The experiment showed that the changes in the tributary model of Rio Grande do Sul were neither economically nor fiscally neutral in short and long term period. This kind of simulation is essential to determine the positioning of the state in the rounds of discussions at Confaz as for allocating the products in the range of pre-determined tax rates by the Senate, because it shows evidences of increasing taxes in one specific sector and deceasing in another. The second experiment applied the proposal of PEC 233/08, assuming that the harmonization will be done through the assimilation of the current effective tax rate average in the country in both analyzed regions. The results showed the harmonization leads to a significant increase in the effective tax rate average in Rio Grande do Sul, which had negative impact in the GDP and employment rate; although, there were significant increases in the tax revenue collected in Rio Grande do Sul (the opposite results were also found for the rest of the country). However, in terms of revenue for the state, this result has its effects diminished due to the changing of rules of ICMS approval regime. Nevertheless, even being potentially smaller, the results show the increase in the revenues collection in comparison to the current revenue income. However, it is likely that this will not be materialized thoroughly in gains for the cash flow of the state, since the legislation provides mechanisms of compensation for ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ with the reform. The temporality and the reform’s own mechanisms do not draw attention to economic matters, but to fiscal ones. The result of the a interregional computable general equilibrium (ICGE) model analysis shows that, for Rio Grande do Sul, the reform can generate harsh results on the economic activities and on the public finances if mechanisms of income compensation blow over the potential of fiscal gains identified in Rio Grande do Sul. In this case, the state would lose twice in the process of reform.

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade, Programa de Pós-Graduação, 2015. / Submitted by Fernanda Percia França (fernandafranca@bce.unb.br) on 2015-12-21T12:31:38Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2015_MárcioFranciscodaSilva.pdf: 7139934 bytes, checksum: ac253c51aadacb24ce372e5f5ae78f54 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Raquel Viana(raquelviana@bce.unb.br) on 2016-01-12T15:22:12Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2015_MárcioFranciscodaSilva.pdf: 7139934 bytes, checksum: ac253c51aadacb24ce372e5f5ae78f54 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-01-12T15:22:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2015_MárcioFranciscodaSilva.pdf: 7139934 bytes, checksum: ac253c51aadacb24ce372e5f5ae78f54 (MD5) / Neste trabalho foram analisadas duas extensões do modelo proposto por (2010). Na primeira versão são introduzidos um setor produtor de imóveis e uma modalidade de empréstimos às famílias impacientes com base no salário esperado. Estas mudanças têm como objetivo mimetizar duas características importantes da economia brasileira: a importância do setor de construção civil e do empréstimo consignado para o ciclo de negócios brasileiro. Na segunda versão do modelo foram incluidas as transações da economia doméstica com o exterior nos setores de bens (importando insumos e exportando bens finais) e financeiro (captação de poupança externa por meio dos bancos). Isto possibilita analisar a importância dos choques externos -a- os choques originados do setor financeiro para a economia brasileira. / This study analyzes two extensions of the model proposed by (2010). In the first one, a housing producing sector was introduced. In addition to that a different form of loans to impatient households is considered that is based on the expected wage of households. When the family takes new loans, her ability of borrowing depends on their expected wage. These changes are intended to mimic two important characteristics of the Brazilian economy: the role of housing sector in the business cycle and the supply of payroll loans. In the second extension of the model, the environment was changed to a small open economy where the transactions of goods (importing raw materials and exporting finished goods) and financial sector (foreign savings funding through banks) to the rest of the world is taken into account. This makes it possible to analyze the importance of external shocks -- the shocks arising from the financial sector to the Brazilian economy.