Aggregate demand is influenced by the functional income distribution of an economy and that of its trading partners. This relationship between income distribution and output is analyzed in a short-run two-country Neo-Kaleckian model. The effects of devaluation and redistribution are discussed in detail. Trade and redistribution within one country interact and output increases or decreases with changes in either depending on the specific distributional and exchange rate movements. The Marshall-Lerner condition is shown to be equivalent to the assumption of expansionary devaluation. If devaluation increases output, national redistribution policy toward wage earners is also more likely to be expansionary. (author's abstract) / Series: Ecological Economic Papers

On the 8th of November, 2016, Prime Minister Modi declared all Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes in circulation, constituting 86% of the currency, to be illegal tender for transactions. All the currency had to be deposited into bank accounts, and new notes would be issued. Amounts deposited over Rs. 250,000 (approx. USD 4000) would face tax scrutiny. The reasoning given for this was to curb corruption, terrorism financing and counterfeiting. This led to a scramble in the economy, giving rise to many dubious schemes for evading the consequences of this policy. There was a significant loss in income for people, however, they were willing to bear the short term pain, in the promise of medium to long term gain. Economists and political thinkers are divided on the merits of this matter. We tested the varied effect of demonetization on the Indian economy by examining the returns of the National Stock Exchange using the Event Study Methodology in the immediate period following demonetization. We found a statistically significant decline in consumption sectors. This was largely driven by decline in the ability to spend. Public Sector Banks (PSBs) saw huge positive abnormal returns, while the Private Banks recorded a lagged negative effect. This may be because the PSBs were riddled with NPAs and in dire need of liquidity, or because of the market’s differentiated perception of corruption within these portfolios. We also find State-Owned Companies to benefit from the announcement.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the provider of many critical natural resources. With such resources, one would expect these countries to have thriving economies. Why is the opposite case true? To answer such a question, this paper examines a few critical causes that may justify the current economic situation these African countries are experiencing. Specifically, the paper observes the economic impact of civil war and terrorist conflict in sub-Saharan Africa from 1971 to 2016. To explore the changes in GDP per capita for all these years, this thesis sheds light on three independent variables: year of conflict, education level, and foreign direct investment for many of the 47 sub-Saharan African countries. Replicating Paul Collier’s Bottom Billion, this thesis will delve into more recent trends of the past two decades, and why the lack of economic advancement is pertinent to these countries. With the results obtained, this thesis proposes solutions to lowering the impact of civil conflict, and steadily advancing the economies across the African continent.

This dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay focuses on developing a quantitative theory for a small open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with a housing sector allowing for both contemporaneous and news shocks. The second essay is an empirical study on the macroeconomic forecasting using both structural and non-structural models. In the first essay, we develop a DSGE model with a housing sector, which incorporates both contemporaneous and news shocks to domestic and external fundamentals, to explore the kind of and the extent to which different shocks to economic fundamentals matter for driving housing market dynamics in a small open economy. The model is estimated by the Bayesian method, using data from Hong Kong. The quantitative results show that external shocks and news shocks play a significant role in this market. Contemporaneous shock to foreign housing preference, contemporaneous shock to terms of trade, and news shocks to technology in the consumption goods sector explain one-third each of the variance of housing price. Terms of trade contemporaneous shock and consumption technology news shocks also contribute 36% and 59%, respectively, to the variance in housing investment. The simulation results enable policy makers to identify the key driving forces behind the housing market dynamics and the interaction between housing market and the macroeconomy in Hong Kong. In the second essay, we compare the forecasting performance between structural and non-structural models for a small open economy. The structural model refers to the small open economy DSGE model with the housing sector in the first essay. In addition, we examine various non-structural models including both Bayesian and classical time-series methods in our forecasting exercises. We also include the information from a large-scale quarterly data series in some models using two approaches to capture the influence of fundamentals: extracting common factors by principal component analysis in a dynamic factor model (DFM), factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR), and Bayesian FAVAR (BFAVAR) or Bayesian shrinkage in a large-scale vector autoregression (BVAR). In this study, we forecast five key macroeconomic variables, namely, output, consumption, employment, housing price inflation, and CPI-based inflation using quarterly data. The results, based on mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE) of one to eight quarters ahead out-of-sample forecasts, indicate that the non-structural models outperform the structural model for all variables of interest across all horizons. Among the non-structural models, small-scale BVAR performs better with short forecasting horizons, although DFM shows a similar predictive ability. As the forecasting horizon grows, DFM tends to improve over other models and is better suited in forecasting key macroeconomic variables at longer horizons.

abstract: This dissertation consists of two parts. The first part is about understanding the mechanism behind female labor supply movement over economic development. Female labor force participation follows a U-shape pattern over per capita GDP cross nationally as well as within some countries. This paper questions if this pattern can be explained through sectoral, uneven technological movements both at market and at home. For that I develop a general equilibrium model with married couples and home production. I defined multiple sectors both at home and in the market. And by feeding the model with uneven technological growth, I observe how participation rate moves over development. My results indicate that a decrease in labor supply is mainly due to structural transformation. Meaning, a higher technology in a large sector causes prices to go up in that sector relative to other. Hence, labor allocated to this sector will decrease. Assuming this sector has a big market share, it will decrease the labor supply. Also, I found that the increase in female labor supply is mostly because of movement from home to market as a result of a higher technological growth in the market. The second part is about developing a methodology to verify and compute the existence of recursive equilibrium in dynamic economies with capital accumulation and elastic labor supply. The method I develop stems from the multi-step monotone mapping methodology which is based on monotone operators and solving a fixed point problem at each step. The methodology is not only useful for verifying and computing the recursive competitive equilibrium, but also useful for obtaining intra- and inter-temporal comparative dynamics. I provide robust intra-temporal comparative statics about how consumption and leisure decisions change in response to changes in capital stock and inverse marginal utility of consumption. I also provide inter-temporal equilibrium comparative dynamics about how recursive equilibrium consumption and investment respond to changes in discount factor and production externality. Different from intra-temporal comparative statics, these are not robust as they only apply to a subclass of equilibrium where investment level is monotone. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Economics 2018

abstract: The present essay addresses the epistemic difficulties involved in achieving consensus with respect to the Hayek-Keynes debate. In particular, it is argued that the debate cannot be settled on the basis of the observable evidence; or, more precisely, that the empirical implications of the theories of Hayek and Keynes are such that, regardless of what is observed, both of the theories can be interpreted as true, or at least, not falsified. Regardless of the evidence, both Hayek and Keynes can be interpreted as right. The underdetermination of theories by evidence is an old and ubiquitous problem in science. The present essay makes explicit the respects in which the empirical evidence underdetermines the choice between the theories of Hayek and Keynes. In particular, it is argued both that there are convenient responses one can offer that protect each theory from what appears to be threatening evidence (i.e., that the choice between the two theories is underdetermined in the holist sense) and that, for particular kinds of evidence, the two theories are empirically equivalent (i.e., with respect to certain kinds of evidence, the choice between the two theories is underdetermined in the contrastive sense). / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Philosophy 2012

Esse estudo tem como objetivo analisar se o saldo em transações correntes japonês, durante os últimos trinta e cinco anos, pode ser explicada pelo modelo de suavização do consumo. O presente trabalho engloba desde derivações formais daqueles modelos mais tradicionais até a estimação do componente de suavização do consumo a ser expresso pelo saldo em transações correntes. De uma forma geral, o modelo intertemporal tem aderência com os dados observados para a economia japonesa, com o resultado obtido principalmente por meio de uma análise de cointegração de Johansen e pela estimação de um VAR bivariado. / This work has as objective to analyze if the Japanese current account in the last 35 years can be explained by the consumption suavization movements. The research deals with the formal derivation and estimates a model for Japanese data. Regarding some hypothesis, the current account model from consumption suavization fits the Japanese data sastifactory. During the period which the research took, was particular in the Japanese economic history, mainly because it was the period of Japanese Miracle had begun but also the most and severe recession in that country. A major recession combined with the most important period of fast economic growth gave a good scenario to exam the shocks suavization movements in the Japanese economy.

The increasing concern with environmental damage and climate change has highlighted the importance of environmental innovations (EI) as an alternative to current technological standards. This thesis aims to contribute to the analysis of the determinants of environmental innovation and also to the identification of the effects of the adoption of environmental innovations on labor demand and performance of Brazilian manufacturing firms. Based on panel data between 1998 and 2008, the results obtained in Chapter 2 corroborate international evidence on the determinants of environmental innovation adoption. The environmental inducement hypothesis is verified, indicating that environmental regulation has an important role to influence the Brazilian firms in order to adopt both technical and organizational environmental innovations. Specifically related to developing countries innovative processes, our results confirm that foreign owned firms are significantly more likely to adopt \"green\" innovation, usually through capital embodied technology transfer and licensing agreements. The size of the firm and physical capital intensity are also important determinants of environmental innovation in Brazilian manufacturing firms. In Chapter 3 we use a translog cost function approach and we analyze the impact of environmental innovations on employment shares and wage bill shares in Brazilian manufacturing industries. The results obtained indicate that environmental technologies are unskilled biased, favoring blue-collar positions and wages, relative to white-collar ones. The \"green-collar\" jobs deriving from the green technologies adopted are in many situations (especially in low and medium technological intensive industrial sectors) filled by blue-collar workers, trained with green skills and thus capable of dealing with environmental preservation challenges. On the other hand, organizational environmental innovations registered a negative impact in blue-collar employment and wage bill shares, reinforcing the skill biased organizational change hypothesis, as the white-collar workforce is better prepared to deal with increased uncertainty, multi-tasking activities and increased responsibility. Concerning the effects of environmental innovation adoption on performance, Chapter 4 modeling strategy is based on a translog production function, due to its flexibility to represent different production structures, especially in the case of more than two factor inputs. The results indicate that both technical EI and organizational EI have positive impact on Brazilian manufacturing firms\' value added. We analyze four different types of technical EI in order to consider different characteristics of each type of EI, including those that reduce resources consumption and those that reduce environmental negative externalities, traditionally understood as additional compliance costs. All the different types of EI tested registered positive correlation with value added change. Pollution abatement investment was also tested and indicated positive effects on value added, even if to a lesser extent. / A crescente preocupação com a degradação ambiental e variações climáticas trouxe à tona a importância de inovações ambientais (IA) como uma alternativa ao padrão tecnológico atual. Esta tese tem como objetivo contribuir para a análise dos determinantes da inovação ambiental e também para a identificação dos seus efeitos sobre a demanda por mão de obra e sobre o valor adicionado das indústrias de transformação brasileiras. Utilizando dados de painel entre 1998 e 2008, os resultados obtidos no capítulo 2 corroboram a evidência internacional sobre os determinantes da adoção de inovações ambientais. A hipótese de viés ambiental é verificada, o que indica que a regulação ambiental apresenta um papel importante para influenciar as firmas brasileiras a adotar tanto inovações ambientais tecnológicas quanto organizacionais. Em relação especificamente ao processo inovativo em países em desenvolvimento, nossos resultados confirmam que empresas de capital estrangeiro têm maior probabilidade de adotar inovações \"verdes\", geralmente através de transferência tecnológica e acordos de licenciamento. O tamanho da firma e a intensidade de capital físico também são importantes determinantes da inovação ambiental nas indústrias de transformação brasileiras. No capítulo 3 utilizamos uma abordagem baseada na função de custo translog e analisamos o impacto de inovações ambientais na participação de emprego e massa salarial nas indústrias brasileiras de manufatura. Os resultados obtidos indicam que as tecnologias ambientais são enviesadas para o trabalho não qualificado, favorecendo o emprego e salários de mão de obra menos qualificada (ou diretamente ligada à produção) em detrimento da mão de obra mais qualificada (ou não diretamente ligada à produção). Os empregos \"verdes\" derivados da adoção de tecnologias ambientais são, em muitos casos (especialmente nos setores de baixa ou média intensidade tecnológica), ocupados por trabalhadores de baixa qualificação treinados com habilidades \"verdes\" e, portanto, capacitados para lidar com os desafios da preservação do meio ambiente. Por outro lado, as inovações ambientais organizacionais registraram um impacto negativo na contratação e nos salários de mão de obra de baixa qualificação, reforçando a hipótese de mudança tecnológica enviesada para a qualificação, uma vez que a mão de obra qualificada é mais bem preparada para lidar com o aumento da incerteza, atividade multitarefas e aumento de responsabilidade. Em relação aos efeitos da adoção de inovações ambientais no valor adicionado da empresa, no capítulo 4 adotamos como estratégia de modelagem uma função de produção translog, devido à sua flexibilidade para representar diferentes estruturas produtivas, especialmente no caso de mais de dois fatores de produção. Os resultados indicam que tanto as IA tecnológicas quanto as organizacionais apresentam impacto positivo sobre o valor adicionado das firmas brasileiras. Nós analisamos quatro tipos diferentes de IA tecnológicas com o intuito de considerar as diferentes características de cada tipo de IA, incluindo aquelas que reduzem o consumo de recursos e aquelas que reduzem as externalidades negativas sobre o meio ambiente, tradicionalmente entendidas como custos adicionais de conformidade à regulação ambiental vigente. Todos os diferentes tipos de IA testados registraram correlação positiva com variações no valor adicionado. Investimento em redução de poluição também foi testado e indicou efeito positive sobre o valor adicionado, ainda que em menor intensidade.

Esta pesquisa investiga o comportamento de determinação de preços na cidade de São Paulo. São analisadas mais de seis milhões de cotações do índice de preços ao consumidor da FIPE. Os principais resultados são: (i) a freqüência média de mudança dos preços é de 32,35% ao mês; (ii) os preços duram em média 2,56 meses; (iii) há grande heterogeneidade entre produtos quanto ao comportamento de mudança dos preços; (iv) 40% das mudanças de preço são para baixo; (v) as mudanças de preço possuem magnitude considerável; (vi) a freqüência de mudança dos preços exibe padrões sazonais em alguns grupos; (vii) a freqüência de mudança dos preços respondeu às incertezas eleitorais de 2002 em alguns grupos; (viii) as funções de risco comum são decrescentes e apresentam picos na duração correspondente a doze meses para alguns subgrupos, e (ix) o risco de mudança dos preços responde ao índice inflacionário para aproximadamente 70% dos subgrupos. / This research investigates the price-setting behavior in São Paulo city. We analyze more than six millions of consumer price index quotes produced by FIPE. The main results are: (i) the average frequency of price change is 32,35% per month; (ii) the prices remain unchanged on average for 2,56 months; (iii) there is a large degree of product heterogeneity related to the behavior of price change; (iv) 40% of price changes are price decreases; (v) the magnitude of price changes is large; (vi) the frequency of price change exhibits seasonal patterns for some groups; (vii) for some groups the frequency of price change was affected by 2002 elections; (viii) the baseline hazard functions are downward-sloping with 12 month spikes for some subgroups, and (ix) the hazard of price change responds to inflation for almost 70% of the subgroups.

Segundo a definição do Banco Central do Brasil (2015) o spread bancário é resultado da diferença entre as taxas de juros das operações de crédito (taxas de aplicação) e as taxas de captação. Mesmo com a abertura econômica do Brasil ao mercado internacional, não foi observada redução significativa do spread e o país destaca-se como um detentor de um dos spreads bancários mais altos quando comparado a outros países (OREIRO et al, 2006). Muitos estudos na literatura concluíram que o spread no Brasil está entre os mais altos do mundo (JORGENSEN e APOSTOLOU, 2013). O objetivo deste estudo consiste em identificar quais dos fatores macroeconômicos e dos indicadores de atividade industrial influenciam o spread bancário no período de Março de 2011 a Março de 2015, por meio de regressão linear multivariada. O Banco Central do Brasil alterou metodologicamente as séries de spread a partir de 1º de março de 2011, sendo esta a data inicial de análise deste trabalho. Foram utilizados dados mensais de séries temporais obtidas majoritariamente por consulta ao Sistema Gerenciador de Séries Temporais (SGS) do Banco Central. Ao todo foram utilizadas dezoito variáveis como candidatas às determinantes do spread no período de análise. Nove o determinam positivamente; a inadimplência total, o IPI para bens de capital, IPI bens intermediários, IPI bens de consumo duráveis, IPI bens semiduráveis e não duráveis, a Selic, o PIB, a taxa de desemprego região metropolitana e o EMBI+. Quatro o determinam negativamente; o IPI bens de consumo, o IPI geral, o saldo da carteira de crédito total para recursos livres e o índice de volume de vendas no varejo. Foi considerado p-valor de até 5,0% para as variáveis que se mostraram inferior a este valor. Foi considerado p-valor de até 10% para as variáveis que se mostraram inferior a este valor e maior que 5,0%. / According to the Central Bank of Brazil (2015) bank spread is the result of the difference between interest rates of credit operations (application rates) and funding rates. Although Brazilian economy has opened to international markets it has not been observed any significant reduction in the Brazilian bank spread and it still stands out as one of the highest bank spreads when compared to other countries (OREIRO et al, 2006). Many studies concluded that spreads in Brazil are the highest in the world (JORGENSEN & APOSTOLOU, 2013). The aim of this study is to identify which of the macroeconomic factors and the industrial activities indexes (IPIs) influence bank spread in the period from March 2011 to March 2015, by using multivariate linear regression. Brazil\'s Central Bank methodologically changed the spread time series starting from March 1st 2011, this is the initial date of this study\'s analysis. Monthly time series data were used mostly obtained by consulting the Time Series Management System (SGS) from the Brazilian Central Bank. Eighteen variables were used as possible candidates to be determinants over bank spread in the period. Nine were found to be positive determinants over bank spread, they are; the total delinquency, the capital goods IPI, intermediate goods IPI, consumer durables IPI, semi-durable and non-durable goods IPI, the Selic (Brazilian basic interest rate), the GDP, the unemployment index for metropolitan area and the EMBI +. Four were found to be negative determinants over bank spread; the overall IPI, the consumer goods IPI, the balance of the total loan portfolio and the sales volume index for total retail. It was considered a 5,0% p-value for the variables which showed to be below this. It was considered a 10% p-value for the variables which showed to be below this value and above 5,0%.