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This dissertation investigates the effects of frictions that emerge from financial markets on business-cycle fluctuations. The purpose of Chapter 1 is to situate my work in the literature and to stress its contributions. In Chapter 2, I reassess the role of financial frictions in amplifying the impacts of productivity shocks using a framework in which a fraction of firms are borrowing-constrained and land is a collateral asset. A first finding is that amplification effects are much lower when land is supplied elastically. However, financial shocks that affect the maximum allowable ratio of loans to collateral have greater effects on output. Another result pertains to the role of the elasticity of substitution between land and capital in responses to financial shocks: lower values generate greater output responses. While Chapter 2's environment is set up to be in a closed-economy, the last two chapters involve two-country settings. Chapter 3 still intersects with Chapter 2 on some dimensions, in particular, land dynamics and financial frictions that feature borrowing-constrained firms. The borrowing mechanism brings about a distortion in labour markets that interacts with a class of preferences that are non-separable between consumption and leisure. Technology shocks contribute to explain international co-movements, whereas financial shocks allow the model to replicate the lack of international risk sharing that is characterized by the quantity anomaly and the Backus-Smith puzzle. In Chapter 4, I apply Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan’s (2007) business cycle accounting method to a two-country, two-good real business cycle model. Using their approach, I measure the same closed-economy time-varying wedges and I introduce an international wedge that accounts for discrepancies between the growth in real exchange rates and in the stochastic discount factors ratio. In fact, the effects of financial frictions embedded in Chapter 3's framework can be retrieved from a combination of labour and investment wedges. The volatility of the international wedge corresponds to a metric of bilateral risk sharing. An important finding is that, from a non-separable preferences specification of the baseline model, the investment wedge partly accounts for the Backus-Smith puzzle. This suggests that distortions in national capital markets are important to consider for international risk sharing. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2013-04-29 22:56:23.03

The purposes of this paper are 1) to determine the microbiotic cycles which occur in Lake Hefner in order to form a basis for ascertaining the effects of future additions of evaporation control chemicals on the biological life of this reservoir, and 2) to make a generalization as to the microbiotic cycles which might occur in Southwestern reservoirs.

This study empirically describes and analyzes the characteristics and functionality of the ―Communities of Practice (CoPs)‖ used within eXtension, a new initiative of the Cooperative Extension (CE) system. It also endeavors to lay the foundation for empirical analysis of CoP processes, which to date have been explained almost exclusively using qualitative case study methods. Land-grant universities were founded on the ideals that higher education should be accessible to all, that the university should teach liberal and practical subjects and should share the college's knowledge with people throughout their states. eXtension is an educational partnership of more than 70 land-grant universities. Its reported purpose is to help Americans improve their lives with access to timely, objective, research-based information and educational opportunities accessed through http://www.extension.org . This Web resource is customized with links to state land-grant university CE Web sites. This mixed-method, action research project applied to the virtual environment describes the extent to which people who became part of an eXtension Communities of Practice (XCoPs) reported that they engaged in purposeful cycles of continuous inquiry in dialog, decision, action, and evaluation (DDAE) and the attainment of eXtension‘s goals. An Internet survey obtained descriptive data of members‘ participation within the eight pioneer XCoPs to assess the extent to which each XCoP engaged in the DDAE cycles of inquiry. Analysis of the survey data resulted in the categorization of low-, medium-, and high-level functioning XCoPs. Members of three pioneer XCoPs representing each category (low, medium, high collaboration) participated in online interviews that revealed how CE‘s reward structure, XCoP membership composition, and leader/member skill sets impact XCoP performance in meeting eXtension goals. Two sets of ―best practices‖ for eXtension initiative staff and XCoPs emerge from the discussion of triangulated data.

The purpose of this study is twofold. Firstly, business cycle theories have been developed as early as 1911 (Shumpeter). These theories are well researched and well documented, and all of these theories concentrate on the real sector. South Africa is an emerging market and since 1994 the country has liberalized its market, a process that holds advantages and disadvantages. This emerging market status as well as the relative size of imports and exports to GDP in South Africa, makes the country very vulnerable to changes in the world economy. Examples of this are the contagion from Asia in 1997, the Russian crisis in 1998, and the impact of September 11 in the US on the South African economy. Business cycles also have changed over the years; they are less volatile and more synchronized over the world and the financial markets play a more important role. This is another reason why it might be useful to identify a financial cycle and investigate its relationship with the real cycle. The SARB (South African Reserve Bank) has some financial indicators in its leading indicator but the latter is mainly driven by real indicators. The financial cycle identified uses the equity market, the capital market and the domestic financial market as components. All of the determinants of these three components are available at a higher frequency than the GDP growth (our proxy for the business cycle); therefore the financial cycle can be used as a leading indicator incorporating international and domestic financial events. Secondly, an ongoing debate in business cycle research is the question of a stable economy (business cycle) influenced by exogenous shocks or an unstable economy with an endogenous business cycle (Classical vs. Keynesian view). This issue will be addressed by modelling the business cycle with a linear as well as a non-linear model. Linear models are usually used to demonstrate exogenous shocks on the business cycle, whereas nonlinear models have more of an endogenous assumption regarding the business cycle. Non-linear models learn over time and adjust to the new level of peaks and troughs and can therefore predict turning points more accurately. This suggests that business cycles have changed since 1960: they became less volatile, more synchronized across the world and the amplitude of peaks and troughs is lower. Because of these characteristics it would be useful to fit a non-linear model to the business cycle. However, exogenous shocks cannot be totally ignored – especially in an emerging market such as South Africa. The STAR (smooth transition autoregressive) model makes room for a linear and a non-linear component, and can over time determine if there is only a linear or non-linear component or sometimes both. The results of this study support the structural or institutional view. They believe economic fluctuations are caused by various structural or institutional changes. Adherents to this view do not believe that the market system is inherently stable or systematically unstable (Classical vs. Keynesian view). They focus on structural changes and unpredictable events. They do not have set ideas on economic policy. According to them the appropriate policy will vary from time to time as circumstances change. / Prof. L. Greyling

Lau, Siu Cheong. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 51-52). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- In search of minimal cycles --- p.9 / Chapter 1.1 --- What do we mean by cycles? --- p.9 / Chapter 1.2 --- Integral currents --- p.10 / Chapter 1.3 --- Calibration theory --- p.13 / Chapter 2 --- Motivation from the Hodge Conjecture --- p.17 / Chapter 2.1 --- Hodge theory on Riemannian manifolds --- p.17 / Chapter 2.2 --- Hodge decomposition in Kahler manifolds --- p.19 / Chapter 2.3 --- The Hodge conjecture --- p.22 / Chapter 3 --- Variation of cycles in symmetric orbit --- p.26 / Chapter 3.1 --- Variational formulae --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- Stability of cycles in Sm and CPn --- p.29 / Chapter 3.3 --- Symmetric orbit in Euclidean space --- p.31 / Chapter 3.4 --- Projective spaces in simple Jordan algebra --- p.39 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Introduction to simple Jordan algebra --- p.39 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Projective spaces as symmetric orbits --- p.41 / Chapter 3.4.3 --- Computation of second fundamental form --- p.43 / Chapter 3.4.4 --- The main theorem --- p.45 / Chapter 3.5 --- Future directions --- p.49 / Bibliography --- p.51

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This dissertation consists of three essays on the sources and desirability of economic fluctuations. Chapter 1 focuses on a source of fluctuations that has long been attached to the history of economic thought on business cycles: sticky prices. I provide a microfounded theory for one of the oldest, but so far informal, explanations of price rigidity: the kinked demand curve theory. Assuming that some customers observe at no cost only the price of the store they happen to be at gives rise to a kink in firms' demand curves: a price increase above the market price repels more customers than a price decrease attracts. The kink in turn makes a range of prices consistent with equilibrium, but an intuitive criterion---the adaptive rational-expectations criterion---selects a unique equilibrium where prices stay constant for a long time. The kinked-demand theory is consistent with price-setters' account of price-rigidity as arising from the customer's---not the firm's---side, and can be tested against menu-cost models in micro data: it predicts that prices should be more likely to change if they have recently changed, and that prices should be more flexible in markets where customers can more easily compare prices. The kinked-demand theory has novel implications for monetary policy: its Phillips curve is strongly convex but does not contain any (present or past) expectations of inflation; its trade-off between output and inflation persists in the long-run; changes to the distribution of sectoral productivity shift the Phillips curve; and monetary shocks have a much longer-lasting real effect than in a menu-cost model, despite also being a model of state-dependent pricing. Chapter 2, written with Emi Nakamura and J\'on Steinsson, starts from the assumption of nominal rigidities---asymmetric wage rigidity this time---to investigate the welfare costs of business cycles. We document that the dynamics of unemployment fit what Milton Friedman labeled a plucking model: a rise in unemployment is followed by a fall of similar amplitude, but the amplitude of the rise does not depend on the previous fall. We develop a microfounded plucking model of the business cycle to account for these phenomena. The model features downward nominal wage rigidity within an explicit search model of the labor market. Our search framework implies that downward nominal wage rigidity is fully consistent with optimizing behavior and equilibrium. We reassess the costs of business cycle fluctuations through the lens of the plucking model. Contrary to New-Keynesian models where fluctuations are cycles around an average natural rate, the plucking model generates fluctuations that are gaps below potential (as in Old-Keynesian models). In this model, business cycle fluctuations raise not only the volatility but also the average level of unemployment, and stabilization policy can reduce the average level of unemployment and therefore yield sizable welfare benefits. Chapter 3 is a contribution to a second branch of Keynesian economics, which sees the possibility of inefficient economic fluctuations not as a consequence of sticky prices, but instead as a more intrinsic property of a system of decentralized production. I ask: how do agents coordinate in a world that they do not fully understand? I consider a dispersed-information coordination game with ambiguity-averse agents who do not trust their models. Because distinguishing models is harder in a noisier economy, the model is one of endogenous ambiguity. Because one agent's noise is another's private information, one agent's reliance on his private information increases how much ambiguity his neighbor faces. I revisit the role of private and public information in this new light. On the positive side, I show that the equilibrium depends less on fundamentals as agents become more ambiguity averse, and not at all in the limit where they become infinitely so. I also show that, because it makes agents trust their model more, the release of public information drives the economy toward fundamentals whenever ambiguity-aversion is high enough, in contrast to the standard result under rational expectations. On the normative side, I show that the equilibrium features too much dependence on fundamentals: agents would rather live in a world that they understand better, even if it means living in a world that is less responsive to changes in fundamentals.

Writers on the business cycle often emphasize that non-linear models are needed to account for certain of its features. Thus it is often said that either the asymmetry of the duration of business cycle expansions and contractions or the variability of these quantities demand a non-linear model. Such comments are rarely made precise however and mostly consist of references to such assertions from the past. Thus the asymmetry in the cycle is mostly accompanied by references to Keynes (1936) and Burns and Mitchell (1946). But these authors were looking at what we call today the classical cycle i.e. movements in the level of GDP, and so the fact that there are long expansions and short contractions can arise simply due to the presence of long-run growth in the economy, and it is not obvious that it has much to do with non-linearity. This thesis aims to introduce various statistics that can be used to characterise the specific shape of the non-linearity observed in macroeconomic time series. Chapter 2 introduces a range of statistics and presents the dating algorithm used in this thesis, which is based on the BBQ algorithm of Harding and Pagan (2002). Chapter 3 tests the adequacy of linear models versus the SETAR model of van Dijk and Franses(2003) and the bounceback model of Kim, Morley and Piger (2005) in capturing observed non-linear features of the data. Chapter 4 extends this work by examining the three state Markov model of Hamilton (1989), again using the ??bounce-back?? model of Kim C., Morley, J. and J. Piger, (2005), and the more complicated ??tension?? model of DeJong, D., Dharmarajan, H., Liesenfeld, R. and Richard, J., (2005). Chapter 4 also extends Chapter 3 by estimating the above mentioned models on US GDP, Australian non-farm GDP, US investment and Australian dwellings investment. They are then simulated in order to gauge the cycle properties. Chapter 5 analyses the business cycle implications of two related multivariate dynamic factor models presented in papers by Kim and Piger (2001, 2002). Finally Chapter 6 concludes.

This thesis examines the difference between the extracted cyclical components of some macroeconomic time series using four popular detrending methods HP, BK, CF and FOD. We use different approaches to compare their differences. A standard examination of the cyclical component is applied. We also take a frequency domain approach and examine the sample spectra for each cycle. Moreover, impulse responses and the correlation between the cyclical components extracted by each detrending method are studied. We conclude that for quarterly data HP, BK and CF produce similar cycles. However, when considering annual data the HP diverges from the other filters. The FOD extracts cycles that are not similar to those of the other three examined filters.