Theoretically, an equiproportionate change in prices and income should not affect the sales of products. This is known as the homogeneity of demand property on which the economic consumer demand theory is built. Rejection of this assumption is indicative of a state of mind called ‘money illusion’. Evidence from applied economics literature suggests that consumers respond asymmetrically to equal changes in prices and income. Such an asymmetry could be, among other things, due to the exclusion of marketing mix variables in their demand functions or inappropriate grouping of products. The main focus of the dissertation is to provide a theoretically consistent approach to include marketing variables in a sales response function. Specifically, advertising is hypothesized to act as a moderator in eliminating the asymmetry. A related issue investigated in this research is the existence and empirical testing of mental expenditure accounts. Grouping of products into mental expenditure accounts is thought to improve the homogeneity of demand. A system of equations is developed since the model involves prices and advertising of all products. The systems approach offers a consistent means to analyze sales when advertising programs interact; for example, orange juice advertising may affect the demand for milk and vice versa. The expenditure share system of equations is estimated using the Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) estimation procedure to allow for dependence among error terms and cross-equation coefficients. Theoretically, this research tests the validity of the well established consumer demand theory. It provides an approach, consistent with neoclassical economic theory, to include marketing mix variables in sales response modeling. Managerially, this study helps in determining the level of advertising necessary to reduce the asymmetry in consumer response due to price and income changes. Substitution patterns obtained from the proposed analysis will aid managers to decide upon prices of closely related products within a category in the wake of income changes. The proposed model provides a methodology to explore and test market structure. / Ph. D.

The first essay uses Chinese Urban Household Survey (CUHS) data from 1988 to 2003 to conduct a cohort analysis of household income, household consumption, and household saving rate, and then uses synthetic panel data to explore the determinants of household saving rate. The cohort analysis not only offers stylized patterns of age profiles on household income, household consumption, and household saving rate but also their profiles of cohort effect and age effect by decomposition work. The cohort analysis likewise tests the relation between cohort effect and productivity growth. Overall, the empirical results present a different pattern compared with other studies and also contradict with the general predictions of the standard model in the consumption theory. In investigating the determinants of household saving rate, this essay examines the roles of household income, economic growth rate, inflation rate, and demographic variables, especially from the perspective of income inequality and systematic difference among cohorts. / The second essay examines the existence of a precautionary saving motive due to labor income uncertainty, using CUHS data from 2002 to 2003. Methodologically, this essay adopts a novel method to construct the proxy for labor income uncertainty, by the ratio of infra-group dispersion conditional on the individuals' labor income determinants to labor income. The empirical results present robust evidence that labor income uncertainty negatively affects household consumption, and there exists obviously different responses to labor income uncertainty from three perspectives: between old households and young households, among different households whose household heads are in different occupations, and between households whose household heads work in the State-owned Units and their counterparts. / The third essay then attempts to explore the determinants of housing wealth and housing price by a hedonic pricing model and evaluate the housing wealth effect on household consumption behavior. For the determinants of housing wealth and housing price, this essay demonstrates that incomplete property rights depress the value of housing asset by both a theoretical model and the empirical results. Regarding housing wealth's effect on household consumption behavior, the empirical results show that the housing wealth effect is significant and that it is obviously smaller for those observations whose houses' property rights are incomplete, compared with their counterparts. / Zhou, Shaojie. / "August 2007." / Advisers: Jun Sen Zhang; Hong bin Li. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0704. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-222). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest dissertations and theses, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

This dissertation explores different aspects of the interaction between money and asset prices. The first chapter investigates how a firm’s financing affects its decision to update prices: does linking interest rates to inflation alter the firm’s optimal price updating strategy? Building on the state dependent pricing models of Willis (2000) and the price indexing literature of Azariadis and Cooper (1985) and Freeman and Tabellini (1998), this model investigates the financing and price updating decisions of a representative firm facing state-dependent pricing and a cash-in-advance constraint. The model shows the circumstances under which a firm’s financing decision affects its price updating decision, and how the likelihood of changing prices affects the amount borrowed. It also illustrates how the use of nominal (as opposed to inflation-linked) interest rates leads to a lower frequency of price updating and higher profits overall for a firm facing menu costs and sticky prices. The second chapter extends the bank run literature to present a theoretical mechanism that explains how money supply can affect asset prices and asset price volatility. In a two period asset allocation model, agents faced with uncertainty cannot perfectly allocate assets ex-ante. After income shocks are revealed, they will be willing to pay a premium over the future fundamental value for an asset in order to consume in the current period. The size of this premium is directly affected by the supply of money relative to the asset. This paper explores the relationship between economy-wide monetary liquidity on the mean and variance of equity returns and in relation to market liquidity. At an index level, I test the impact of money-based liquidity measures against existing measures of market liquidity. I proceed to do a stock level analysis of liquidity following Pastor and Stambaugh (2003). The results indicated that measures of aggregate money supply are able to match several of the observed relationships in stock return data much better than market liquidity. At an individual stock level, monetary liquidity is a priced factor for individual stocks. Taken together, these papers support the idea that changes in the money supply have consequences for the real economy. / text

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This dissertation uses original datasets from the U.S. and Japan to explore issues in spatial economics and public finance. In the first chapter, I study how the relocation of inventors affects local and aggregate growth through technological diffusion across U.S. cities. I propose a quantitative spatial theory of growth and knowledge diffusion through internal migration. My model highlights two mechanisms by which productivity growth can be higher in one city than in another: (1) agglomeration forces and (2) knowledge inflows through internal migration. Using data on US cities, I find that knowledge diffusion explains approximately 40 percent of the spatial variation in productivity changes, and agglomeration forces explain the rest. I quantify the dynamic effects of place-based policies and find that reducing the costs of migrating to a small number of cities can improve aggregate efficiency while reducing disparities in productivity across cities. Growing spatial inequality has led policymakers to enact tax breaks to attract corporate investment and jobs to economically peripheral regions. In the second chapter, co-authored with Cameron LaPoint, we demonstrate the importance of multi-plant firms’ physical capital structure for the take-up and efficacy of place-based policies by studying a national bonus depreciation scheme in Japan which altered the relative cost of capital across locations, offering high-tech manufacturers immediate cost deductions from their corporate income tax bill. Combining corporate balance sheets with a registry containing investment by plant location and asset type, we find the policy generated big gains in employment and investment in building construction and in machines at pre-existing production sites, with an implied partial equilibrium fiscal cost per job created of $16,000. The policy produced a welfare gain of $56.72 billion, or roughly 40% of one year’s worth of average annual corporate profits. For eligible firms, plant-level hiring in ineligible areas outstripped that in eligible areas, suggesting reallocation of resources within firms’ internal capital and labor markets mitigates the spatial misallocation inherent in subsidizing low-productivity areas. How governments should choose the frequency of payments has received little attention in the literature on the optimal design of benefits programs. In the third chapter, co-authored with Cameron LaPoint, we propose a simple model in which the government chooses the interval length between payments, subject to a tradeoff between the costs of providing more frequent benefits and welfare gains from mitigating consumption non-smoothing. Using a high-frequency retail dataset that links consumers to their purchase history, we apply the model to the Japanese National Pension System. Our evidence suggests suboptimal intra-cycle consumption patterns with negligible retailer price discrimination. Model calibrations support the worldwide prevalence of monthly payment systems.

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This dissertation consists of three independent essays. We briefly introduce these essays in chapter 1 and leave a comprehensive introduction to each essay. Chapter 2 considers a vertically separated industry where production takes time and vertical mergers shorten production time. We investigate the impact of vertical mergers on the downstream firms' ability to collude and show that vertical mergers facilitate downstream collusion. Chapter 3 provides a theoretical foundation for a puzzling empirical observation that advertising follows an inverted U shape for some new products. Chapter 4 analyzes an incumbent's response to a competitive entry. We show that if the quality of the entrant is uncertain, the incumbent can "jam" the quality signalling of the entrant. Finally, chapter 5 summarizes main conclusions of three essays. / text

Scale invariance, collective behaviours and structural reorganization are crucial for portfolio management (portfolio composition, hedging, alternative definition of risk, etc.). This lack of any characteristic scale and such elaborated behaviours find their origin in the theory of complex systems. There are several mechanisms which generate scale invariance but maximum entropy models are able to explain both scale invariance and collective behaviours.<p>The study of the structure and collective modes of financial markets attracts more and more attention. It has been shown that some agent based models are able to reproduce some stylized facts. Despite their partial success, there is still the problem of rules design. In this work, we used a statistical inverse approach to model the structure and co-movements in financial markets. Inverse models restrict the number of assumptions. We found that a pairwise maximum entropy model is consistent with the data and is able to describe the complex structure of financial systems. We considered the existence of a critical state which is linked to how the market processes information, how it responds to exogenous inputs and how its structure changes. The considered data sets did not reveal a persistent critical state but rather oscillations between order and disorder.<p>In this framework, we also showed that the collective modes are mostly dominated by pairwise co-movements and that univariate models are not good candidates to model crashes. The analysis also suggests a genuine adaptive process since both the maximum variance of the log-likelihood and the accuracy of the predictive scheme vary through time. This approach may provide some clue to crash precursors and may provide highlights on how a shock spreads in a financial network and if it will lead to a crash. The natural continuation of the present work could be the study of such a mechanism. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Accurate estimation of alcohol price elasticity is important for policy analysis – e.g.., determining optimal taxes and projecting revenues generated from proposed tax changes. Several approaches to specifying and estimating the price elasticity of demand for alcohol can be found in the literature. There are two keys to policy-relevant specification and estimation of alcohol price elasticity. First, the underlying demand model should take account of alcohol consumption decisions at the extensive margin – i.e., individuals' decisions to drink or not – because the price of alcohol may impact the drinking initiation decision and one's decision to drink is likely to be structurally different from how much they drink if they decide to do so (the intensive margin). Secondly, the modeling of alcohol demand elasticity should yield both theoretical and empirical results that are causally interpretable. The elasticity estimates obtained from the existing two-part model takes into account the extensive margin, but are not causally interpretable. The elasticity estimates obtained using aggregate-level models, however, are causally interpretable, but do not explicitly take into account the extensive margin. There currently exists no specification and estimation method for alcohol price elasticity that both accommodates the extensive margin and is causally interpretable. I explore additional sources of bias in the extant approaches to elasticity specification and estimation: 1) the use of logged (vs. nominal) alcohol prices; and 2) implementation of unnecessarily restrictive assumptions underlying the conventional two-part model. I propose a new approach to elasticity specification and estimation that covers the two key requirements for policy relevance and remedies all such biases. I find evidence of substantial divergence between the new and extant methods using both simulated and the real data. Such differences are profound when placed in the context of alcohol tax revenue generation.

This thesis addresses three relevant macroeconomic issues: (i) why<p>Central Banks behave so cautiously compared to optimal theoretical<p>benchmarks, (ii) do monetary variables add information about<p>future Euro Area inflation to a large amount of non monetary<p>variables and (iii) why national saving and investment are so<p>correlated in OECD countries in spite of the high degree of<p>integration of international financial markets.<p><p>The process of innovation in the elaboration of economic theory<p>and statistical analysis of the data witnessed in the last thirty<p>years has greatly enriched the toolbox available to<p>macroeconomists. Two aspects of such a process are particularly<p>noteworthy for addressing the issues in this thesis: the<p>development of macroeconomic dynamic stochastic general<p>equilibrium models (see Woodford, 1999b for an historical<p>perspective) and of techniques that enable to handle large data<p>sets in a parsimonious and flexible manner (see Reichlin, 2002 for<p>an historical perspective).<p><p>Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models (DSGE) provide the<p>appropriate tools to evaluate the macroeconomic consequences of<p>policy changes. These models, by exploiting modern intertemporal<p>general equilibrium theory, aggregate the optimal responses of<p>individual as consumers and firms in order to identify the<p>aggregate shocks and their propagation mechanisms by the<p>restrictions imposed by optimizing individual behavior. Such a<p>modelling strategy, uncovering economic relationships invariant to<p>a change in policy regimes, provides a framework to analyze the<p>effects of economic policy that is robust to the Lucas'critique<p>(see Lucas, 1976). The early attempts of explaining business<p>cycles by starting from microeconomic behavior suggested that<p>economic policy should play no role since business cycles<p>reflected the efficient response of economic agents to exogenous<p>sources of fluctuations (see the seminal paper by Kydland and Prescott, 1982}<p>and, more recently, King and Rebelo, 1999). This view was challenged by<p>several empirical studies showing that the adjustment mechanisms<p>of variables at the heart of macroeconomic propagation mechanisms<p>like prices and wages are not well represented by efficient<p>responses of individual agents in frictionless economies (see, for<p>example, Kashyap, 1999; Cecchetti, 1986; Bils and Klenow, 2004 and Dhyne et al. 2004). Hence, macroeconomic models currently incorporate<p>some sources of nominal and real rigidities in the DSGE framework<p>and allow the study of the optimal policy reactions to inefficient<p>fluctuations stemming from frictions in macroeconomic propagation<p>mechanisms.<p><p>Against this background, the first chapter of this thesis sets up<p>a DSGE model in order to analyze optimal monetary policy in an<p>economy with sectorial heterogeneity in the frequency of price<p>adjustments. Price setters are divided in two groups: those<p>subject to Calvo type nominal rigidities and those able to change<p>their prices at each period. Sectorial heterogeneity in price<p>setting behavior is a relevant feature in real economies (see, for<p>example, Bils and Klenow, 2004 for the US and Dhyne, 2004 for the Euro<p>Area). Hence, neglecting it would lead to an understatement of the<p>heterogeneity in the transmission mechanisms of economy wide<p>shocks. In this framework, Aoki (2001) shows that a Central<p>Bank maximizing social welfare should stabilize only inflation in<p>the sector where prices are sticky (hereafter, core inflation).<p>Since complete stabilization is the only true objective of the<p>policymaker in Aoki (2001) and, hence, is not only desirable<p>but also implementable, the equilibrium real interest rate in the<p>economy is equal to the natural interest rate irrespective of the<p>degree of heterogeneity that is assumed. This would lead to<p>conclude that stabilizing core inflation rather than overall<p>inflation does not imply any observable difference in the<p>aggressiveness of the policy behavior. While maintaining the<p>assumption of sectorial heterogeneity in the frequency of price<p>adjustments, this chapter adds non negligible transaction<p>frictions to the model economy in Aoki (2001). As a<p>consequence, the social welfare maximizing monetary policymaker<p>faces a trade-off among the stabilization of core inflation,<p>economy wide output gap and the nominal interest rate. This<p>feature reflects the trade-offs between conflicting objectives<p>faced by actual policymakers. The chapter shows that the existence<p>of this trade-off makes the aggressiveness of the monetary policy<p>reaction dependent on the degree of sectorial heterogeneity in the<p>economy. In particular, in presence of sectorial heterogeneity in<p>price adjustments, Central Banks are much more likely to behave<p>less aggressively than in an economy where all firms face nominal<p>rigidities. Hence, the chapter concludes that the excessive<p>caution in the conduct of monetary policy shown by actual Central<p>Banks (see, for example, Rudebusch and Svennsson, 1999 and Sack, 2000) might not<p>represent a sub-optimal behavior but, on the contrary, might be<p>the optimal monetary policy response in presence of a relevant<p>sectorial dispersion in the frequency of price adjustments.<p><p>DSGE models are proving useful also in empirical applications and<p>recently efforts have been made to incorporate large amounts of<p>information in their framework (see Boivin and Giannoni, 2006). However, the<p>typical DSGE model still relies on a handful of variables. Partly,<p>this reflects the fact that, increasing the number of variables,<p>the specification of a plausible set of theoretical restrictions<p>identifying aggregate shocks and their propagation mechanisms<p>becomes cumbersome. On the other hand, several questions in<p>macroeconomics require the study of a large amount of variables.<p>Among others, two examples related to the second and third chapter<p>of this thesis can help to understand why. First, policymakers<p>analyze a large quantity of information to assess the current and<p>future stance of their economies and, because of model<p>uncertainty, do not rely on a single modelling framework.<p>Consequently, macroeconomic policy can be better understood if the<p>econometrician relies on large set of variables without imposing<p>too much a priori structure on the relationships governing their<p>evolution (see, for example, Giannone et al. 2004 and Bernanke et al. 2005).<p>Moreover, the process of integration of good and financial markets<p>implies that the source of aggregate shocks is increasingly global<p>requiring, in turn, the study of their propagation through cross<p>country links (see, among others, Forni and Reichlin, 2001 and Kose et al. 2003). A<p>priori, country specific behavior cannot be ruled out and many of<p>the homogeneity assumptions that are typically embodied in open<p>macroeconomic models for keeping them tractable are rejected by<p>the data. Summing up, in order to deal with such issues, we need<p>modelling frameworks able to treat a large amount of variables in<p>a flexible manner, i.e. without pre-committing on too many<p>a-priori restrictions more likely to be rejected by the data. The<p>large extent of comovement among wide cross sections of economic<p>variables suggests the existence of few common sources of<p>fluctuations (Forni et al. 2000 and Stock and Watson, 2002) around which<p>individual variables may display specific features: a shock to the<p>world price of oil, for example, hits oil exporters and importers<p>with different sign and intensity or global technological advances<p>can affect some countries before others (Giannone and Reichlin, 2004). Factor<p>models mainly rely on the identification assumption that the<p>dynamics of each variable can be decomposed into two orthogonal<p>components - common and idiosyncratic - and provide a parsimonious<p>tool allowing the analysis of the aggregate shocks and their<p>propagation mechanisms in a large cross section of variables. In<p>fact, while the idiosyncratic components are poorly<p>cross-sectionally correlated, driven by shocks specific of a<p>variable or a group of variables or measurement error, the common<p>components capture the bulk of cross-sectional correlation, and<p>are driven by few shocks that affect, through variable specific<p>factor loadings, all items in a panel of economic time series.<p>Focusing on the latter components allows useful insights on the<p>identity and propagation mechanisms of aggregate shocks underlying<p>a large amount of variables. The second and third chapter of this<p>thesis exploit this idea.<p><p>The second chapter deals with the issue whether monetary variables<p>help to forecast inflation in the Euro Area harmonized index of<p>consumer prices (HICP). Policymakers form their views on the<p>economic outlook by drawing on large amounts of potentially<p>relevant information. Indeed, the monetary policy strategy of the<p>European Central Bank acknowledges that many variables and models<p>can be informative about future Euro Area inflation. A peculiarity<p>of such strategy is that it assigns to monetary information the<p>role of providing insights for the medium - long term evolution of<p>prices while a wide range of alternative non monetary variables<p>and models are employed in order to form a view on the short term<p>and to cross-check the inference based on monetary information.<p>However, both the academic literature and the practice of the<p>leading Central Banks other than the ECB do not assign such a<p>special role to monetary variables (see Gali et al. 2004 and<p>references therein). Hence, the debate whether money really<p>provides relevant information for the inflation outlook in the<p>Euro Area is still open. Specifically, this chapter addresses the<p>issue whether money provides useful information about future<p>inflation beyond what contained in a large amount of non monetary<p>variables. It shows that a few aggregates of the data explain a<p>large amount of the fluctuations in a large cross section of Euro<p>Area variables. This allows to postulate a factor structure for<p>the large panel of variables at hand and to aggregate it in few<p>synthetic indexes that still retain the salient features of the<p>large cross section. The database is split in two big blocks of<p>variables: non monetary (baseline) and monetary variables. Results<p>show that baseline variables provide a satisfactory predictive<p>performance improving on the best univariate benchmarks in the<p>period 1997 - 2005 at all horizons between 6 and 36 months.<p>Remarkably, monetary variables provide a sensible improvement on<p>the performance of baseline variables at horizons above two years.<p>However, the analysis of the evolution of the forecast errors<p>reveals that most of the gains obtained relative to univariate<p>benchmarks of non forecastability with baseline and monetary<p>variables are realized in the first part of the prediction sample<p>up to the end of 2002, which casts doubts on the current<p>forecastability of inflation in the Euro Area.<p><p>The third chapter is based on a joint work with Domenico Giannone<p>and gives empirical foundation to the general equilibrium<p>explanation of the Feldstein - Horioka puzzle. Feldstein and Horioka (1980) found<p>that domestic saving and investment in OECD countries strongly<p>comove, contrary to the idea that high capital mobility should<p>allow countries to seek the highest returns in global financial<p>markets and, hence, imply a correlation among national saving and<p>investment closer to zero than one. Moreover, capital mobility has<p>strongly increased since the publication of Feldstein - Horioka's<p>seminal paper while the association between saving and investment<p>does not seem to comparably decrease. Through general equilibrium<p>mechanisms, the presence of global shocks might rationalize the<p>correlation between saving and investment. In fact, global shocks,<p>affecting all countries, tend to create imbalance on global<p>capital markets causing offsetting movements in the global<p>interest rate and can generate the observed correlation across<p>national saving and investment rates. However, previous empirical<p>studies (see Ventura, 2003) that have controlled for the effects<p>of global shocks in the context of saving-investment regressions<p>failed to give empirical foundation to this explanation. We show<p>that previous studies have neglected the fact that global shocks<p>may propagate heterogeneously across countries, failing to<p>properly isolate components of saving and investment that are<p>affected by non pervasive shocks. We propose a novel factor<p>augmented panel regression methodology that allows to isolate<p>idiosyncratic sources of fluctuations under the assumption of<p>heterogenous transmission mechanisms of global shocks. Remarkably,<p>by applying our methodology, the association between domestic<p>saving and investment decreases considerably over time,<p>consistently with the observed increase in international capital<p>mobility. In particular, in the last 25 years the correlation<p>between saving and investment disappears.<p> / Doctorat en sciences économiques, Orientation économie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished