In the first chapter of my thesis, titled “Interventions in Credit Markets and Effects on Economic Activity: Evidence from Brazil,” I investigate the impact of the Brazilian government policy implemented in March 2012, which aimed at increasing credit supply through public banks. Using bank branch level data, I find that the policy successfully increased overall credit supply, as increased lending of public banks did not significantly offset private lending. On the other hand, there is no evidence of significant client-switching between private and public banks. However, the effects of the policy on economic activity were limited and even negligible. I conduct a series of robustness checks to further explore this puzzling result. I find evidence suggesting that increased lending led to significant increases in deposits, indicating that borrowers leveraged easily accessible credit to take loans and save funds for future use. In the second chapter, titled “Television Introduction and Agricultural Production,” I investigate how improved information affected agricultural activity in the U.S. Specifically, I argue that the introduction of television brings more comprehensible weather forecast information to farmers, improving their decision making process. Using data about television entry and county level farming production in a difference-in-differences methodology, I estimate economically significant effect of television introduction on crop yields.

This dissertation studies topics in international macroeconomics. In the first chapter, I develop a heterogeneous agent model of a small open economy and studies how households differ in their responses to aggregate productivity and interest rate shocks. Poor households display stronger consumption responses to an aggregate productivity shock because they are more likely to be constrained in liquid assets. In contrast, rich households display stronger consumption responses to an interest rate shock because they are more likely to be unconstrained in liquid assets. When the economy experiences a sudden stop, defined as transitory contractionary shocks to productivity and the interest rate, the interest rate effect neutralizes the productivity effect. As a consequence, the sudden stop generates consumption-income elasticities that display little variation along the income distribution, similar to a permanent shock. My finding captures the observed behavior of households in the Mexican Peso Crisis of 1994. In the second chapter, I study a small open economy subject to a borrowing constraint which experiences stochastic volatility in its output endowment. I find that volatility shocks induce substantial changes in borrowing by households, in excess of the precautionary savings response. Household responses to volatility shocks increases the standard deviation of borrowing, but not the standard deviation of consumption, suggesting small welfare costs. Stochastic volatility increases the frequency of financial crises in a decentralized economy that overborrowsdue to a pecuniary externality, but not a socially optimal economy. In the third chapter, I introduce income heterogeneity into a small open economy model with an occasionally binding collateral constraint. Income heterogeneity generates poor households that borrow up to the constraint to smooth over their income shock. This differs from representative agent models that require a depressed aggregate state for the representative household to interact with the constraint. As a consequence, the model displays a higher average marginal propensity to consume which generates a higher volatility of aggregate consumption. The model with income heterogeneity fails to generate sudden stops. This occurs as the income shock generates rich households that are able to consumption smooth throughout contractions. In the fourth chapter, I trace the path between a benchmark representative agent model and a benchmark heterogeneous agent model. Heterogeneous agent models typically introduce idiosyncratic income risk, a financial friction in the form of a borrowing or non-negativity constraint, and recalibrate the impatience of households. This paper studies the effect of each term. With the minimal financial friction that households cannot starve, complete markets fail, but income risk has no significant effect on the aggregate response of consumption to an endowment or interest rate shock relative to a representative agent benchmark. Heterogeneity and significant financial frictions generate empirically realistic marginal propensities to consume, but fail to alter the aggregate consumption response. Decreasing the impatience of households is necessary to significantly alter aggregate responses to endowment and interest rate shocks.

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Cette thèse contient trois études sur le fonctionnement des banques.<p>Le premier Chapitre analyse empiriquement comment la capacité d’offrir des emprunts à long terme est influencée par la dimension des intermédiaires financiers.<p>Le deuxième Chapitre analyse, avec un model théorique caractérisé par la présence de soft-budget constraint, ratchet effect et short-termism, comment la pression compétitive influence la capacité des banque de financer le firmes ayant des projets de bonne qualité.<p>Le troisième Chapitre examine, avec un model théorique du type moral hazard common agency, le conflits d'intérêts des banques universelles.<p><p>Financial intermediaries are recognized to promote the efficiency of resource allocation by mitigating problems of incentives, asymmetric information and contract incompleteness. The role played by financial intermediaries is considered so crucial that these institutions have received all over the world the greatest attention of regulators.<p>Across and within banking sectors it is possible to observe a wide variety of intermediaries. Banks may differ in their size, market power and degree of specialization. This variety raises interesting questions about the features of a well functioning banking sector. These questions have inspired an important body of economic literature which, however, is still inconclusive in many aspects. This dissertation includes three studies intending to contribute in this direction.<p>Chapter 1 will empirically study the willingness of smaller and larger lenders to grant long-term loans which, as credit to SME's, constitute an opaque segment of the credit market. Chapter 2 analyzes, with a theoretical model, the effects of competition on the efficiency of the banking sector when this is characterized by dynamic commitment issues which brings to excessive refinancing of bad quality investments (so called soft-budget constraint) or excessive termination of good ones (ratchet effect and short-termism). Chapter 3 presents a model to investigate to what extent the distortions posed by conflicts of interest in universal banks can be addressed through the provision of appropriate incentive schemes by the different categories of clients. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished