U.S. water withdrawals have increased slowly since 1980, despite significant growth in the population and economy during this period. This implies that other factors have contributed to offsetting decreases in water withdrawals. The economic input-output life cycle assessment (EIO-LCA) model was used to estimate the total water withdrawal for 135 industrial summary sectors for 1997 and 2002. The change in water withdrawals for the economy from 1997 to 2002 was allocated to changes in five governing factors — population, GDP per capita, water use intensity, production structure, and consumption pattern — using structural decomposition analysis (SDA). The changes in population, GDP per capita and water use intensity increased total water withdrawal, while the changes in production structure and consumption pattern decreased water withdrawals from 1997 to 2002. Consumption pattern change was the largest net contributor to the change in water withdrawals. The counter balancing of these factors is what has kept U.S. water withdrawals relatively constant. To project U.S. water withdrawal for the next 20 years, four scenarios were developed for each of the five governing factors based upon available predictions or historical trends. The total water withdrawals for U.S. 66 aggregated industrial sectors for 2013-2030 were projected using the EIO-LCA model with fixed and changing economic structure, respectively. The structure and consumption pattern were held constant at the 2012 level and the other three factors were varied across time in the EIO-LCA model with fixed economic structure, while all five governing factors were changed across time with changing economic structure. The maximum projected total water withdrawal is 370 trillion gallons for 2030, which is more than 2.5 times the 2005 U.S. water withdrawal, corresponding to a scenario with maximum growth assumptions for all factors considered. The medians of total water withdrawals projected by the models with constant vs. evolving economic structure for 2013-2030 follow a continuous increasing trend, and the projected median values by the two models are comparable. The median of total water withdrawal will reach around 180 trillion gallons in 2030, about 1.2 times the 2005 U.S. water withdrawal. The variance in GDP per capita and water use intensity were the two most significant contributors to the uncertainty in projected total water withdrawals for U.S. industrial sectors. The distinction of consumptive and non-consumptive water use is important for water resource management and assessment of availability and quality of water sources. Consumptive water use coefficients (ratio of consumptive water use to water withdrawal) were estimated by aggregated industrial sectors based on available data. The projected total consumptive water uses for all industrial sectors range from 45-47 trillion gallons in 2013 to 23-51 trillion gallons in 2030 using the EIO-LCA model with fixed economic structure. The median total consumptive water use is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 0.5% during this period. The effects of changes in cooling technology for thermoelectric power generation and irrigation technology for agriculture on changes in consumptive water use for other sectors during 2013-2030 were investigated. Changes in cooling technology do not impact consumptive water use projections for most sectors, but do impact power generation-related sectors. Shifts in irrigation technology do not only affect consumptive water use for agriculture, but also affect significantly the consumptive water use for sectors requiring agricultural products as important supply chain components.

The active use of macroeconomic policies to smooth economic fluctuations and, as a consequence, the stance that policymakers should adopt over the business cycle, remain controversial issues in the economic literature. In the light of the dramatic experience of the early 1930s’ Great Depression, Keynes (1936) argued that the market mechanism could not be relied upon to spontaneously recover from a slump, and advocated counter-cyclical public spending and monetary policy to stimulate demand. Albeit the Keynesian doctrine had largely influenced policymaking during the two decades following World War II, it began to be seriously challenged in several directions since the start of the 1970s. The introduction of rational expectations within macroeconomic models implied that aggregate demand management could not stabilize the economy’s responses to shocks (see in particular Sargent and Wallace (1975)). According to this view, in fact, rational agents foresee the effects of the implemented policies, and wage and price expectations are revised upwards accordingly. Therefore, real wages and money balances remain constant and so does output. Within such a conceptual framework, only unexpected policy interventions would have some short-run effects upon the economy. The "real business cycle (RBC) theory", pioneered by Kydland and Prescott (1982), offered an alternative explanation on the nature of fluctuations in economic activity, viewed as reflecting the efficient responses of optimizing agents to exogenous sources of fluctuations, outside the direct control of policymakers. The normative implication was that there should be no role for economic policy activism: fiscal and monetary policy should be acyclical. The latest generation of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models builds on rigorous foundations in intertemporal optimizing behavior by consumers and firms inherited from the RBC literature, but incorporates some frictions in the adjustment of nominal and real quantities in response to macroeconomic shocks (see Woodford (2003)). In such a framework, not only policy "surprises" may have an impact on the economic activity, but also the way policymakers "systematically" respond to exogenous sources of fluctuation plays a fundamental role in affecting the economic activity, thereby rekindling interest in the use of counter-cyclical stabilization policies to fine tune the business cycle. Yet, despite impressive advances in the economic theory and econometric techniques, there are no definitive answers on the systematic stance policymakers should follow, and on the effects of macroeconomic policies upon the economy. Against this background, the present thesis attempts to inspect the interrelations between macroeconomic policies and the economic activity from novel angles. Three contributions are proposed. In the first Chapter, I show that relying on the information actually available to policymakers when budgetary decisions are taken is of fundamental importance for the assessment of the cyclical stance of governments. In the second, I explore whether the effectiveness of fiscal shocks in spurring the economic activity has declined since the beginning of the 1970s. In the third, the impact of systematic monetary policies over U.S. industrial sectors is investigated. In the existing literature, empirical assessments of the historical stance of policymakers over the economic cycle have been mainly drawn from the estimation of "reduced-form" policy reaction functions (see in particular Taylor (1993) and Galì and Perotti (2003)). Such rules typically relate a policy instrument (a reference short-term interest rate or an indicator of discretionary fiscal policy) to a set of explanatory variables (notably inflation, the output gap and the debt-GDP ratio, as long as fiscal policy is concerned). Although these policy rules can be seen as simple approximations of what derived from an explicit optimization problem solved by social planners (see Kollmann (2007)), they received considerable attention since they proved to track the behavior of central banks and fiscal policymakers relatively well. Typically, revised data, i.e. observations available to the econometrician when the study is carried out, are used in the estimation of such policy reaction functions. However, data available in "real-time" to policymakers may end up to be remarkably different from what it is observed ex-post. Orphanides (2001), in an innovative and thought-provoking paper on the U.S. monetary policy, challenged the way policy evaluation was conducted that far by showing that unrealistic assumptions about the timeliness of data availability may yield misleading descriptions of historical policy. In the spirit of Orphanides (2001), in the first Chapter of this thesis I reconsider how the intentional cyclical stance of fiscal authorities should be assessed. Importantly, in the framework of fiscal policy rules, not only variables such as potential output and the output gap are subject to measurement errors, but also the main discretionary "operating instrument" in the hands of governments: the structural budget balance, i.e. the headline government balance net of the effects due to automatic stabilizers. In fact, the actual realization of planned fiscal measures may depend on several factors (such as the growth rate of GDP, the implementation lags that often follow the adoption of many policy measures, and others more) outside the direct and full control of fiscal authorities. Hence, there might be sizeable differences between discretionary fiscal measures as planned in the past and what it is observed ex-post. To be noted, this does not apply to monetary policy since central bankers can control their operating interest rates with great accuracy. When the historical behavior of fiscal authorities is analyzed from a real-time perspective, it emerges that the intentional stance has been counter-cyclical, especially during expansions, in the main OECD countries throughout the last thirteen years. This is at odds with findings based on revised data, generally pointing to pro-cyclicality (see for example Gavin and Perotti (1997)). It is shown that empirical correlations among revision errors and other second-order moments allow to predict the size and the sign of the bias incurred in estimating the intentional stance of the policy when revised data are (mistakenly) used. It addition, formal tests, based on a refinement of Hansen (1999), do not reject the hypothesis that the intentional reaction of fiscal policy to the cycle is characterized by two regimes: one counter-cyclical, when output is above its potential level, and the other acyclical, in the opposite case. On the contrary, the use of revised data does not allow to identify any threshold effect. The second and third Chapters of this thesis are devoted to the exploration of the impact of fiscal and monetary policies upon the economy. Over the last years, two approaches have been mainly followed by practitioners for the estimation of the effects of macroeconomic policies on the real activity. On the one hand, calibrated and estimated DSGE models allow to trace out the economy’s responses to policy disturbances within an analytical framework derived from solid microeconomic foundations. On the other, vector autoregressive (VAR) models continue to be largely used since they have proved to fit macro data particularly well, albeit they cannot fully serve to inspect structural interrelations among economic variables. Yet, the typical DSGE and VAR models are designed to handle a limited number of variables and are not suitable to address economic questions potentially involving a large amount of information. In a DSGE framework, in fact, identifying aggregate shocks and their propagation mechanism under a plausible set of theoretical restrictions becomes a thorny issue when many variables are considered. As for VARs, estimation problems may arise when models are specified in a large number of indicators (although latest contributions suggest that large-scale Bayesian VARs perform surprisingly well in forecasting. See in particular Banbura, Giannone and Reichlin (2007)). As a consequence, the growing popularity of factor models as effective econometric tools allowing to summarize in a parsimonious and flexible manner large amounts of information may be explained not only by their usefulness in deriving business cycle indicators and forecasting (see for example Reichlin (2002) and D’Agostino and Giannone (2006)), but also, due to recent developments, by their ability in evaluating the response of economic systems to identified structural shocks (see Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). Parallelly, some attempts have been made to combine the rigor of DSGE models and the tractability of VAR ones, with the advantages of factor analysis (see Boivin and Giannoni (2006) and Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005)). The second Chapter of this thesis, based on a joint work with Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, presents an original study combining factor and VAR analysis in an encompassing framework, to investigate how "unexpected" and "unsystematic" variations in taxes and government spending feed through the economy in the home country and abroad. The domestic impact of fiscal shocks in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. and cross-border fiscal spillovers from Germany to seven European economies is analyzed. In addition, the time evolution of domestic and cross-border tax and spending multipliers is explored. In fact, the way fiscal policy impacts on domestic and foreign economies depends on several factors, possibly changing over time. In particular, the presence of excess capacity, accommodating monetary policy, distortionary taxation and liquidity constrained consumers, plays a prominent role in affecting how fiscal policies stimulate the economic activity in the home country. The impact on foreign output crucially depends on the importance of trade links, on real exchange rates and, in a monetary union, on the sensitiveness of foreign economies to the common interest rate. It is well documented that the last thirty years have witnessed frequent changes in the economic environment. For instance, in most OECD countries, the monetary policy stance became less accommodating in the 1980s compared to the 1970s, and more accommodating again in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Moreover, financial markets have been heavily deregulated. Hence, fiscal policy might have lost (or gained) power as a stimulating tool in the hands of policymakers. Importantly, the issue of cross-border transmission of fiscal policy decisions is of the utmost relevance in the framework of the European Monetary Union and this explains why the debate on fiscal policy coordination has received so much attention since the adoption of the single currency (see Ahearne, Sapir and Véron (2006) and European Commission (2006)). It is found that over the period 1971 to 2004 tax shocks have generally been more effective in spurring domestic output than government spending shocks. Interestingly, the inclusion of common factors representing global economic phenomena yields to smaller multipliers reconciling, at least for the U.K., the evidence from large-scale macroeconomic models, generally finding feeble multipliers (see e.g. European Commission’s QUEST model), with the one from a prototypical structural VAR pointing to stronger effects of fiscal policy. When the estimation is performed recursively over samples of seventeen years of data, it emerges that GDP multipliers have dropped drastically from early 1990s on, especially in Germany (tax shocks) and in the U.S. (both tax and government spending shocks). Moreover, the conduct of fiscal policy seems to have become less erratic, as documented by a lower variance of fiscal shocks over time, and this might contribute to explain why business cycles have shown less volatility in the countries under examination. Expansionary fiscal policies in Germany do not generally have beggar-thy-neighbor effects on other European countries. In particular, our results suggest that tax multipliers have been positive but vanishing for neighboring countries (France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria), weak and mostly not significant for more remote ones (the U.K. and Spain). Cross-border government spending multipliers are found to be monotonically weak for all the subsamples considered. Overall these findings suggest that fiscal "surprises", in the form of unexpected reductions in taxation and expansions in government consumption and investment, have become progressively less successful in stimulating the economic activity at the domestic level, indicating that, in the framework of the European Monetary Union, policymakers can only marginally rely on this discretionary instrument as a substitute for national monetary policies. The objective of the third chapter is to inspect the role of monetary policy in the U.S. business cycle. In particular, the effects of "systematic" monetary policies upon several industrial sectors is investigated. The focus is on the systematic, or endogenous, component of monetary policy (i.e. the one which is related to the economic activity in a stable and predictable way), for three main reasons. First, endogenous monetary policies are likely to have sizeable real effects, if agents’ expectations are not perfectly rational and if there are some nominal and real frictions in a market. Second, as widely documented, the variability of the monetary instrument and of the main macro variables is only marginally explained by monetary "shocks", defined as unexpected and exogenous variations in monetary conditions. Third, monetary shocks can be simply interpreted as measurement errors (see Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (1998)). Hence, the systematic component of monetary policy is likely to have played a fundamental role in affecting business cycle fluctuations. The strategy to isolate the impact of systematic policies relies on a counterfactual experiment, within a (calibrated or estimated) macroeconomic model. As a first step, a macroeconomic shock to which monetary policy is likely to respond should be selected, and its effects upon the economy simulated. Then, the impact of such shock should be evaluated under a “policy-inactive” scenario, assuming that the central bank does not respond to it. Finally, by comparing the responses of the variables of interest under these two scenarios, some evidence on the sensitivity of the economic system to the endogenous component of the policy can be drawn (see Bernanke, Gertler and Watson (1997)). Such kind of exercise is first proposed within a stylized DSGE model, where the analytical solution of the model can be derived. However, as argued, large-scale multi-sector DSGE models can be solved only numerically, thus implying that the proposed experiment cannot be carried out. Moreover, the estimation of DSGE models becomes a thorny issue when many variables are incorporated (see Canova and Sala (2007)). For these arguments, a less “structural”, but more tractable, approach is followed, where a minimal amount of identifying restrictions is imposed. In particular, a factor model econometric approach is adopted (see in particular Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). In this framework, I develop a technique to perform the counterfactual experiment needed to assess the impact of systematic monetary policies. It is found that 2 and 3-digit SIC U.S. industries are characterized by very heterogeneous degrees of sensitivity to the endogenous component of the policy. Notably, the industries showing the strongest sensitivities are the ones producing durable goods and metallic materials. Non-durable good producers, food, textile and lumber producing industries are the least affected. In addition, it is highlighted that industrial sectors adjusting prices relatively infrequently are the most "vulnerable" ones. In fact, firms in this group are likely to increase quantities, rather than prices, following a shock positively hitting the economy. Finally, it emerges that sectors characterized by a higher recourse to external sources to finance investments, and sectors investing relatively more in new plants and machineries, are the most affected by endogenous monetary actions.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the determinants of exit by bankruptcy in industrial sectors in Sweden. The dataset which is used gives a complete picture of the pattern of exit by bankruptcy on industry level in both manufacturing and service sectors in Sweden during the period 2004-2008. The importance of some industry structural factors such as scale economies, profitability, tangible and intangible capital intensity and industrial market growth rate for exit by bankruptcy are investigated. The use of two types of exit rates by bankruptcy (by firms and by employees) contributes to the current research. The two-way fixed effects model is used for the dependent variable of exit rate calculated by number of bankruptcies and total number of registered firms. The results show that only the long-term industrial market growth rate affects the exit rate by bankruptcy and it has a negative effect. The GLS in the two-way random effects model is used for the dependent variable of exit rate calculated by number of employees of bankruptcies. The results in this model, however, show that the existence of scale economies, more profitability, and investments in tangible and intangible capital assets all deter the number of bankruptcy.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第19340号 / 情博第592号 / 新制||情||103(附属図書館) / 32342 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 多々納 裕一, 教授 矢守 克也, 教授 守屋 和幸 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DGAM

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第23316号 / 情博第752号 / 新制||情||128(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 多々納 裕一, 教授 畑山 満則, 准教授 大西 正光 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DGAM

Bakgrund: Varje år går många företag i konkurs och detta innebär stora kostnader på kort sikt. Kreditgivare, ägare, investerare, borgenärer, företagsledning, anställda samt samhället är de som i störst utsträckning drabbas av detta. För att kunna bedöma ett företags ekonomiska hälsa är det därför en viktig del att kunna prognostisera risken för en konkurs. Till hjälp har vi olika konkursmodeller som har utvecklats sedan början av 1960-talet och fram till idag. Syfte: Att undersöka tre internationella konkursmodeller för att se om dessa kan tillämpas på svenska företag samt jämföra träffsäkerheten från vår studie med konkursmodellernas originalstudier. Metod: Undersökningen är baserad på en kvantitativ forskningsstrategi med en deduktiv ansats. Urvalet grundas på företag som gick i konkurs år 2014. Till detta kommer också en kontrollgrupp bestående av lika stor andel friska företag att undersökas. Det slumpmässiga urvalet kom att bestå av 30 konkursföretag samt 30 friska företag från tillverknings- och industribranschen. Teori: I denna studie undersöks tre konkursmodeller; Altman, Fulmer och Springate. Dessa modeller och tidigare forskning presenteras utförligare i teoriavsnittet. Dessutom beskrivs under teoriavsnittet några nyckeltal som är relevanta vid konkursprediktion. Resultat och slutsats: Modellerna är inte tillämpbara på svenska företag då resultaten från vår studie inte visar tillräcklig träffsäkerhet och är därför måste betecknas som otillförlitliga. / Background: Each year many companies go bankrupt and it is associated with significant costs in the short term. Creditors, owners, investors, management, employees and society are those that gets most affected by the bankruptcy. To be able to estimate a company’s financial health it is important to be able to predict the risk of a bankruptcy. To help, we have different bankruptcy prediction models that have been developed through time, since the 1960s until today, year 2015. Purpose: To examine three international bankruptcy prediction models to see if they are  applicable to Swedish business and also compare the accuracy from our study with each bankruptcy prediction models original study. Method: The study was based on a quantitative research strategy and also a deductive research approach. The selection was based on companies that went bankrupt in year 2014. Added to this is a control group consisting of healthy companies that will also be examined. Finally, the random sample consisted of 30 bankrupt companies and 30 healthy companies that belong to the manufacturing and industrial sectors. Theory: In this study three bankruptcy prediction models are examined; Altman, Fulmer and Springate. These models and also previous research in bankruptcy prediction are further described in the theory section. In addition some financial ratios that are relevant in bankruptcy prediction are also described. Result and conclusion: The models are not applicable in the Swedish companies.  The results of this study have not showed sufficient accuracy and they can therefore be regarded as unreliable.

Em um período de mudanças climáticas e restrições a emissões cada vez maiores, é importante focar o desenvolvimento das nações na direção de uma economia de baixo carbono. O elevado consumo de combustíveis fósseis gera danos que atingem escalas globais, regionais e locais e põem em risco o suprimento de longo prazo no planeta. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o desempenho dos principais setores industriais brasileiros considerando seus respectivos consumos energéticos e contribuições para aspectos sociais e econômicos do país. Além disso, busca-se mensurar os benefícios ambientais, no que diz respeito à emissão de CO2, resultante da alteração de energéticos nos setores industriais de menor desempenho e discutir políticas públicas que visam estimular a utilização de fontes de energia mais limpas. Para atingir o objetivo proposto, foi realizada a análise e quantificação da potencial contribuição ambiental que a alteração da matriz energética dos setores com menor desempenho em relação à sua contribuição para o desenvolvimento sustentável, pode fornecer. Para determinar o desempenho dos setores foi utilizada a Análise Envoltória de Dados (DEA). Os resultados deste estudo indicaram que o setor metalúrgico e o setor de não metálicos são os que possuem o menor desempenho, considerando as variáveis selecionadas. Já para medir as emissões de CO2 dos principais combustíveis utilizados nos setores de menor desempenho foi utilizado o método Top-Down proposto pelo IPCC. A análise indicou que, apesar do carvão vegetal ser o segundo emissor de CO2, ele pode contribuir para a redução do aquecimento global, desde que seja proveniente de mata de reflorestamento destinada para a atividade industrial. Por fim, foi realizada uma breve discussão sobre as políticas públicas voltadas a este energético. / In a period of climate change and of an increasingly restriction of emissions, it is pivotal to focus on a development by countries towards an economy revolved on low carbon dioxide levels. The high consumption of fossil fuels results in damages on a global, regional and local level threatening long-term supply in our planet. This work has as its objective to analyze the performance of the main Brazilian industrial sectors considering their energy consumption and contributions to social and economic aspects of the country. In addition, will be measure the environmental benefits, in terms of CO2 emissions, resulting from fuel substitution in the industrial sectors of lower performance and discuss public policies aimed at stimulating the use of cleaner energy sources. So as to achieve this objective, an analysis and measurement assertion of the potential environmental contribution that a change of the energy matrix, of the sectors with lower performance as regards to its contribution to sustainable development of the country, may provide was performed. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used to determine the efficiency of the sectors. The results of this study indicated that the metallurgical and nonmetallic sectors are the ones that have the lowest performance industrial in terms of sustainable. For the measurement of CO2 emissions for each major fuel used in the sectors with lower performance, the Top-Down method proposed by the IPCC was used. This analysis indicated that, although charcoal is the second fuel in sectors that emit more CO2, it can contribute to the reduction of global warming since it comes from forest reforestation destined for the activity industrial. Finally, a brief discussion about public policies on this fuel was held.

This thesis consists of five individual essays and an introductory chapter. The essays are all in the field of industrial dynamics and more specifically focus on firm entry and exit in Swedish industrial sectors. The essays mainly contribute to the empirical literature on entry and exit. In four of the five essays, panel data methods are used in the empirical investigation. The first essay presents the patterns of entry and exit in industrial sectors in Sweden and studies the importance of different determinants of entry and exit rates in industries. The second essay focuses on the relationship between entry and exit. The third essay has a regional perspective, focusing on regional determinants of entry and exit. It also investigates the importance of the differences in industry structure for differences in entry and exit rates across regions. The fourth chapter uses the theory of product life cycle to investigate how knowledge intensity differs in entering and exiting firms in different stages of the product life cycle. The fifth and last essay focuses on the importance of firm demography, in terms of firm size and age, for the decision to perform process R&D, product R&D or combine process with product R&D.

Em um período de mudanças climáticas e restrições a emissões cada vez maiores, é importante focar o desenvolvimento das nações na direção de uma economia de baixo carbono. O elevado consumo de combustíveis fósseis gera danos que atingem escalas globais, regionais e locais e põem em risco o suprimento de longo prazo no planeta. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o desempenho dos principais setores industriais brasileiros considerando seus respectivos consumos energéticos e contribuições para aspectos sociais e econômicos do país. Além disso, busca-se mensurar os benefícios ambientais, no que diz respeito à emissão de CO2, resultante da alteração de energéticos nos setores industriais de menor desempenho e discutir políticas públicas que visam estimular a utilização de fontes de energia mais limpas. Para atingir o objetivo proposto, foi realizada a análise e quantificação da potencial contribuição ambiental que a alteração da matriz energética dos setores com menor desempenho em relação à sua contribuição para o desenvolvimento sustentável, pode fornecer. Para determinar o desempenho dos setores foi utilizada a Análise Envoltória de Dados (DEA). Os resultados deste estudo indicaram que o setor metalúrgico e o setor de não metálicos são os que possuem o menor desempenho, considerando as variáveis selecionadas. Já para medir as emissões de CO2 dos principais combustíveis utilizados nos setores de menor desempenho foi utilizado o método Top-Down proposto pelo IPCC. A análise indicou que, apesar do carvão vegetal ser o segundo emissor de CO2, ele pode contribuir para a redução do aquecimento global, desde que seja proveniente de mata de reflorestamento destinada para a atividade industrial. Por fim, foi realizada uma breve discussão sobre as políticas públicas voltadas a este energético. / In a period of climate change and of an increasingly restriction of emissions, it is pivotal to focus on a development by countries towards an economy revolved on low carbon dioxide levels. The high consumption of fossil fuels results in damages on a global, regional and local level threatening long-term supply in our planet. This work has as its objective to analyze the performance of the main Brazilian industrial sectors considering their energy consumption and contributions to social and economic aspects of the country. In addition, will be measure the environmental benefits, in terms of CO2 emissions, resulting from fuel substitution in the industrial sectors of lower performance and discuss public policies aimed at stimulating the use of cleaner energy sources. So as to achieve this objective, an analysis and measurement assertion of the potential environmental contribution that a change of the energy matrix, of the sectors with lower performance as regards to its contribution to sustainable development of the country, may provide was performed. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used to determine the efficiency of the sectors. The results of this study indicated that the metallurgical and nonmetallic sectors are the ones that have the lowest performance industrial in terms of sustainable. For the measurement of CO2 emissions for each major fuel used in the sectors with lower performance, the Top-Down method proposed by the IPCC was used. This analysis indicated that, although charcoal is the second fuel in sectors that emit more CO2, it can contribute to the reduction of global warming since it comes from forest reforestation destined for the activity industrial. Finally, a brief discussion about public policies on this fuel was held.

The active use of macroeconomic policies to smooth economic fluctuations and, as a<p>consequence, the stance that policymakers should adopt over the business cycle, remain<p>controversial issues in the economic literature.<p>In the light of the dramatic experience of the early 1930s’ Great Depression, Keynes (1936)<p>argued that the market mechanism could not be relied upon to spontaneously recover from<p>a slump, and advocated counter-cyclical public spending and monetary policy to stimulate<p>demand. Albeit the Keynesian doctrine had largely influenced policymaking during<p>the two decades following World War II, it began to be seriously challenged in several<p>directions since the start of the 1970s. The introduction of rational expectations within<p>macroeconomic models implied that aggregate demand management could not stabilize<p>the economy’s responses to shocks (see in particular Sargent and Wallace (1975)). According<p>to this view, in fact, rational agents foresee the effects of the implemented policies, and<p>wage and price expectations are revised upwards accordingly. Therefore, real wages and<p>money balances remain constant and so does output. Within such a conceptual framework,<p>only unexpected policy interventions would have some short-run effects upon the economy.<p>The "real business cycle (RBC) theory", pioneered by Kydland and Prescott (1982), offered<p>an alternative explanation on the nature of fluctuations in economic activity, viewed<p>as reflecting the efficient responses of optimizing agents to exogenous sources of fluctuations, outside the direct control of policymakers. The normative implication was that<p>there should be no role for economic policy activism: fiscal and monetary policy should be<p>acyclical. The latest generation of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium<p>(DSGE) models builds on rigorous foundations in intertemporal optimizing behavior by<p>consumers and firms inherited from the RBC literature, but incorporates some frictions<p>in the adjustment of nominal and real quantities in response to macroeconomic shocks<p>(see Woodford (2003)). In such a framework, not only policy "surprises" may have an<p>impact on the economic activity, but also the way policymakers "systematically" respond<p>to exogenous sources of fluctuation plays a fundamental role in affecting the economic<p>activity, thereby rekindling interest in the use of counter-cyclical stabilization policies to<p>fine tune the business cycle.<p>Yet, despite impressive advances in the economic theory and econometric techniques, there are no definitive answers on the systematic stance policymakers should follow, and on the<p>effects of macroeconomic policies upon the economy. Against this background, the present thesis attempts to inspect the interrelations between macroeconomic policies and the economic activity from novel angles. Three contributions<p>are proposed. <p><p>In the first Chapter, I show that relying on the information actually available to policymakers when budgetary decisions are taken is of fundamental importance for the assessment of the cyclical stance of governments. In the second, I explore whether the effectiveness of fiscal shocks in spurring the economic activity has declined since the beginning of the 1970s. In the third, the impact of systematic monetary policies over U.S. industrial sectors is investigated. In the existing literature, empirical assessments of the historical stance of policymakers over the economic cycle have been mainly drawn from the estimation of "reduced-form" policy reaction functions (see in particular Taylor (1993) and Galì and Perotti (2003)). Such rules typically relate a policy instrument (a reference short-term interest rate or an indicator of discretionary fiscal policy) to a set of explanatory variables (notably inflation, the output gap and the debt-GDP ratio, as long as fiscal policy is concerned). Although these policy rules can be seen as simple approximations of what derived from an explicit optimization problem solved by social planners (see Kollmann (2007)), they received considerable attention since they proved to track the behavior of central banks and fiscal<p>policymakers relatively well. Typically, revised data, i.e. observations available to the<p>econometrician when the study is carried out, are used in the estimation of such policy<p>reaction functions. However, data available in "real-time" to policymakers may end up<p>to be remarkably different from what it is observed ex-post. Orphanides (2001), in an<p>innovative and thought-provoking paper on the U.S. monetary policy, challenged the way<p>policy evaluation was conducted that far by showing that unrealistic assumptions about<p>the timeliness of data availability may yield misleading descriptions of historical policy.<p>In the spirit of Orphanides (2001), in the first Chapter of this thesis I reconsider how<p>the intentional cyclical stance of fiscal authorities should be assessed. Importantly, in<p>the framework of fiscal policy rules, not only variables such as potential output and the<p>output gap are subject to measurement errors, but also the main discretionary "operating<p>instrument" in the hands of governments: the structural budget balance, i.e. the headline<p>government balance net of the effects due to automatic stabilizers. In fact, the actual<p>realization of planned fiscal measures may depend on several factors (such as the growth<p>rate of GDP, the implementation lags that often follow the adoption of many policy<p>measures, and others more) outside the direct and full control of fiscal authorities. Hence,<p>there might be sizeable differences between discretionary fiscal measures as planned in the<p>past and what it is observed ex-post. To be noted, this does not apply to monetary policy<p>since central bankers can control their operating interest rates with great accuracy.<p>When the historical behavior of fiscal authorities is analyzed from a real-time perspective, it emerges that the intentional stance has been counter-cyclical, especially during expansions, in the main OECD countries throughout the last thirteen years. This is at<p>odds with findings based on revised data, generally pointing to pro-cyclicality (see for example Gavin and Perotti (1997)). It is shown that empirical correlations among revision<p>errors and other second-order moments allow to predict the size and the sign of the bias<p>incurred in estimating the intentional stance of the policy when revised data are (mistakenly)<p>used. It addition, formal tests, based on a refinement of Hansen (1999), do not reject<p>the hypothesis that the intentional reaction of fiscal policy to the cycle is characterized by<p>two regimes: one counter-cyclical, when output is above its potential level, and the other<p>acyclical, in the opposite case. On the contrary, the use of revised data does not allow to identify any threshold effect.<p><p>The second and third Chapters of this thesis are devoted to the exploration of the impact<p>of fiscal and monetary policies upon the economy.<p>Over the last years, two approaches have been mainly followed by practitioners for the<p>estimation of the effects of macroeconomic policies on the real activity. On the one hand,<p>calibrated and estimated DSGE models allow to trace out the economy’s responses to<p>policy disturbances within an analytical framework derived from solid microeconomic<p>foundations. On the other, vector autoregressive (VAR) models continue to be largely<p>used since they have proved to fit macro data particularly well, albeit they cannot fully<p>serve to inspect structural interrelations among economic variables.<p>Yet, the typical DSGE and VAR models are designed to handle a limited number of variables<p>and are not suitable to address economic questions potentially involving a large<p>amount of information. In a DSGE framework, in fact, identifying aggregate shocks and<p>their propagation mechanism under a plausible set of theoretical restrictions becomes a<p>thorny issue when many variables are considered. As for VARs, estimation problems may<p>arise when models are specified in a large number of indicators (although latest contributions suggest that large-scale Bayesian VARs perform surprisingly well in forecasting.<p>See in particular Banbura, Giannone and Reichlin (2007)). As a consequence, the growing<p>popularity of factor models as effective econometric tools allowing to summarize in<p>a parsimonious and flexible manner large amounts of information may be explained not<p>only by their usefulness in deriving business cycle indicators and forecasting (see for example<p>Reichlin (2002) and D’Agostino and Giannone (2006)), but also, due to recent<p>developments, by their ability in evaluating the response of economic systems to identified<p>structural shocks (see Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi<p>and Reichlin (2007)). Parallelly, some attempts have been made to combine the rigor of<p>DSGE models and the tractability of VAR ones, with the advantages of factor analysis<p>(see Boivin and Giannoni (2006) and Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005)).<p><p>The second Chapter of this thesis, based on a joint work with Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, presents an original study combining factor and VAR analysis in an encompassing framework,<p>to investigate how "unexpected" and "unsystematic" variations in taxes and government<p>spending feed through the economy in the home country and abroad. The domestic<p>impact of fiscal shocks in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. and cross-border fiscal spillovers<p>from Germany to seven European economies is analyzed. In addition, the time evolution of domestic and cross-border tax and spending multipliers is explored. In fact, the way fiscal policy impacts on domestic and foreign economies<p>depends on several factors, possibly changing over time. In particular, the presence of excess<p>capacity, accommodating monetary policy, distortionary taxation and liquidity constrained<p>consumers, plays a prominent role in affecting how fiscal policies stimulate the<p>economic activity in the home country. The impact on foreign output crucially depends<p>on the importance of trade links, on real exchange rates and, in a monetary union, on<p>the sensitiveness of foreign economies to the common interest rate. It is well documented<p>that the last thirty years have witnessed frequent changes in the economic environment.<p>For instance, in most OECD countries, the monetary policy stance became less accommodating<p>in the 1980s compared to the 1970s, and more accommodating again in the<p>late 1990s and early 2000s. Moreover, financial markets have been heavily deregulated.<p>Hence, fiscal policy might have lost (or gained) power as a stimulating tool in the hands<p>of policymakers. Importantly, the issue of cross-border transmission of fiscal policy decisions is of the utmost relevance in the framework of the European Monetary Union and this explains why the debate on fiscal policy coordination has received so much attention since the adoption<p>of the single currency (see Ahearne, Sapir and Véron (2006) and European Commission<p>(2006)). It is found that over the period 1971 to 2004 tax shocks have generally been more effective in spurring domestic output than government spending shocks. Interestingly, the inclusion of common factors representing global economic phenomena yields to smaller multipliers<p>reconciling, at least for the U.K. the evidence from large-scale macroeconomic models,<p>generally finding feeble multipliers (see e.g. European Commission’s QUEST model), with<p>the one from a prototypical structural VAR pointing to stronger effects of fiscal policy.<p>When the estimation is performed recursively over samples of seventeen years of data, it<p>emerges that GDP multipliers have dropped drastically from early 1990s on, especially<p>in Germany (tax shocks) and in the U.S. (both tax and government spending shocks).<p>Moreover, the conduct of fiscal policy seems to have become less erratic, as documented<p>by a lower variance of fiscal shocks over time, and this might contribute to explain why<p>business cycles have shown less volatility in the countries under examination.<p>Expansionary fiscal policies in Germany do not generally have beggar-thy-neighbor effects<p>on other European countries. In particular, our results suggest that tax multipliers have<p>been positive but vanishing for neighboring countries (France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria), weak and mostly not significant for more remote ones (the U.K.<p>and Spain). Cross-border government spending multipliers are found to be monotonically<p>weak for all the subsamples considered.<p>Overall these findings suggest that fiscal "surprises", in the form of unexpected reductions in taxation and expansions in government consumption and investment, have become progressively less successful in stimulating the economic activity at the domestic level, indicating that, in the framework of the European Monetary Union, policymakers can only marginally rely on this discretionary instrument as a substitute for national monetary policies. <p><p>The objective of the third chapter is to inspect the role of monetary policy in the U.S. business cycle. In particular, the effects of "systematic" monetary policies upon several industrial sectors is investigated. The focus is on the systematic, or endogenous, component of monetary policy (i.e. the one which is related to the economic activity in a stable and predictable way), for three main reasons. First, endogenous monetary policies are likely to have sizeable real effects, if agents’ expectations are not perfectly rational and if there are some nominal and real frictions in a market. Second, as widely documented, the variability of the monetary instrument and of the main macro variables is only marginally explained by monetary "shocks", defined as unexpected and exogenous variations in monetary conditions. Third, monetary shocks can be simply interpreted as measurement errors (see Christiano, Eichenbaum<p>and Evans (1998)). Hence, the systematic component of monetary policy is likely to have played a fundamental role in affecting business cycle fluctuations. The strategy to isolate the impact of systematic policies relies on a counterfactual experiment, within a (calibrated or estimated) macroeconomic model. As a first step, a macroeconomic shock to which monetary policy is likely to respond should be selected,<p>and its effects upon the economy simulated. Then, the impact of such shock should be<p>evaluated under a “policy-inactive” scenario, assuming that the central bank does not respond<p>to it. Finally, by comparing the responses of the variables of interest under these<p>two scenarios, some evidence on the sensitivity of the economic system to the endogenous<p>component of the policy can be drawn (see Bernanke, Gertler and Watson (1997)).<p>Such kind of exercise is first proposed within a stylized DSGE model, where the analytical<p>solution of the model can be derived. However, as argued, large-scale multi-sector DSGE<p>models can be solved only numerically, thus implying that the proposed experiment cannot<p>be carried out. Moreover, the estimation of DSGE models becomes a thorny issue when many variables are incorporated (see Canova and Sala (2007)). For these arguments, a less “structural”, but more tractable, approach is followed, where a minimal amount of<p>identifying restrictions is imposed. In particular, a factor model econometric approach<p>is adopted (see in particular Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone,<p>Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). In this framework, I develop a technique to perform the counterfactual experiment needed to assess the impact of systematic monetary policies.<p>It is found that 2 and 3-digit SIC U.S. industries are characterized by very heterogeneous degrees of sensitivity to the endogenous component of the policy. Notably, the industries showing the strongest sensitivities are the ones producing durable goods and metallic<p>materials. Non-durable good producers, food, textile and lumber producing industries are<p>the least affected. In addition, it is highlighted that industrial sectors adjusting prices relatively infrequently are the most "vulnerable" ones. In fact, firms in this group are likely to increase quantities, rather than prices, following a shock positively hitting the economy. Finally, it emerges that sectors characterized by a higher recourse to external sources to finance investments, and sectors investing relatively more in new plants and machineries, are the most affected by endogenous monetary actions. / Doctorat en sciences économiques, Orientation économie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished