Two DSGE models are calibrated and simulated to investigate how the role of monetarypolicy differs between a closed and an open economy. The central bank conducts monetary policy according to a Taylor (1993) rule, reacting to inflation- and output deviations. Prices are sticky and there are habit components which slow down adjustment of consumption and exports. The models are subjected to shocks in the interest rate, inflation, technology and consumption. In most of the cases the shocks have a bigger and quicker affect on output and employment in the open economy. In connection with positive consumption- and interest rate shocks inflation is big and negative at first but gets positive already two quarters after the shock, due to effects in the exchange rate channel. In closed and open economies, a stronger reaction to output, than in the standard Taylor (1993) rule, decreases welfare losses dramatically.

This thesis aims to understand the sources of business cycles observed in Turkish economy. In particular the thesis investigates the role of investment shocks in explaining fluctuations in output. For this purpose a small open economy DSGE model is estimated on Turkish data for 2002-2011 period by Bayesian methods. Variance decomposition analysis shows that permanent technology shock is the key driving force of business cycles in Turkish economy and the role of investment shock is less spelled.

The main objective of the dissertation is to apply recent advances in modern econometric analysis, namely cointegrating Vector Autoregression (VAR) and Bayesian VAR (BVAR) to a small open regional economy like Hawaii. This is accomplished in three related yet independent essays demonstrating how regional modeling and forecasting can benefit from these latest developments. The first essay concentrates on the cointegrating VAR analysis, applying it to Hawaii's premier industry-tourism. Recent research in the literature on identified cointegrating VARs emphasizes the need to rely on economic theory to impose weak exogeneity assumptions, guide the search for long-run just (over) identifying restrictions and shrink the model to the most parsimonious representation. While cointegration analysis has gradually appeared in the empirical tourism literature, the focus has been exclusively on the demand side with no use of the latest identification techniques. A complete Hawaii tourism model is developed, exploiting Hall, Henry, and Greenslade's (2002) theory-directed sequential reduction methodology. Both demand and supply factors are emphasized in identifying long-run cointegrating relationships. The second essay applies the BVAR methodology to another key sector in regional modeling-construction. This essay represents the first application of priors on linear combinations of parameters-namely, sums of coefficients and dummy initial observation priors - in a BVAR construction forecasting model. I find that including these priors does not necessarily improve forecast accuracy at medium to long horizons, especially when the series are integrated and there is more than one cointegrating relationship. The third essay extends the second essay to deal with the entire regional economy. All regional models must deal with the inavailability of expenditure data at the state and local levels. This problem typically leads researchers to use either a single highly restricted VAR, or BVAR, or a model of pseudo theory driven equations. In contrast, my third essay makes use of BVAR blocks to model proxies for the expenditure categories in a traditional macro structure. Compared with existing regional BVAR models, the current setup is more complete in accounting for both the intra-action of sectors within the region and the inter-action of the region with external drivers.

This dissertation contains a series of essays that provide empirical evidence for Australia on some fundamental predictions of real business cycle models and on the convergence and persistence of real interest rates. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to the issues examined in each chapter and provides an overview of the methodologies that are used. Tests of various basic predictions of standard real business cycle models for Australia are presented in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. Chapter 2 considers the question of great ratios for Australia. These are ratios of macroeconomic variables that are predicted by standard models to be stationary in the steady state. Using time series econometric techniques (unit root tests and cointegration tests) Australia great ratios are examined. In Chapter 3 a more restrictive implication of real business cycle models than the existence of great ratios is considered. Following the methodology proposed by Canova, Finn and Pagan (1994) the equilibrium decision rules for some standard real business cycle are tested on Australian data. The final essay on this topic is presented in Chapter 4. In this chapter a large-country, small-country is used to try and understand the reason for the sharp rise in Australia??s share of world output that began around 1990. Chapter 5 discusses real interest rate linkages in the Pacific Basin region. Vector autoregressive models and bootstrap methods are adopted to study financial linkages between East Asian markets, Japan and US. Given the apparent non-stationarity of real interest rates a related issue is examined in Chapter 6, viz. the persistence of international real interest rates and estimation of their half-life. Half-life is selected as a means of measuring persistence of real rates. Bootstrap methods are employed to overcome small sample issues in the estimation and a non-standard statistical inference methodology (Highest Density Regions) is adopted. Chapter 7 reapplies the High Density Regions methodology and bootstrap half-life estimation to the data used in Chapters 2 and 5. This provides a robustness check on the results of standard unit root tests that were applied to the data in those chapters. Main findings of the thesis are as follows. The long run implications of real business cycle models are largely rejected by the Australia data. This finding holds for both the existence of great ratios and when the explicit decision rules are employed. When the small open economy features of the Australian economy are incorporated in a two country RBC model, a country-specific productivity boom seems to provide a possible explanation for the rise in Australia??s share of world output. The essays that examine real interest rates suggest the following results. Following the East Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 there appears to have been a decline in the importance of Japan in influencing developments in the Pacific Basin region. In addition there is evidence that following the crisis Korea??s financial market became less insular and more integrated with the US. Finally results obtained from the half-life estimators suggest that despite the usual findings from unit root tests, real interest rates may in fact exhibit mean-reversion.

abstract: I study the importance of financial factors and real exchange rate shocks in explaining business cycle fluctuations, which have been considered important in the literature as non-technological factors in explaining business cycle fluctuations. In the first chapter, I study the implications of fluctuations in corporate credit spreads for business cycle fluctuations. Motivated by the fact that corporate credit spreads are countercyclical, I build a simple model in which difference in default probabilities on corporate debts leads to the spread in interest rates paid by firms. In the model, firms differ in the variance of the firm-level productivity, which is in turn linked to the difference in the default probability. The key mechanism is that an increase in the variance of productivity for risky firms relative to safe firms leads to reallocation of capital away from risky firms toward safe firms and decrease in aggregate output and productivity. I embed the above mechanism into an otherwise standard growth model, calibrate it and numerically solve for the equilibrium. In my benchmark case, I find that shocks to variance of productivity for risky and safe firms account for about 66% of fluctuations in output and TFP in the U.S. economy. In the second chapter, I study the importance of shocks to the price of imports relative to the price of final goods, led by the real exchange rate shocks, in accounting for fluctuations in output and TFP in the Korean economy during the Asian crisis of 1997-98. Using the Korean data, I calibrate a standard small open economy model with taxes and tariffs on imported goods, and simulate it. I find that shocks to the price of imports are an important source of fluctuations in Korea's output and TFP in the Korean crisis episode. In particular, in my benchmark case, shocks to the price of imports account for about 55% of the output deviation (from trend), one third of the TFP deviation and three quarters of the labor deviation in 1998. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Economics 2011

Doctor of Philosophy / Economics / Yang M. Chang / This dissertation comprises of three essays in industrial economics. My first essay analyzes social efficiency of entry into a downstream oligopoly of a vertical market structure, where an upstream supplier sells an essential input to all firms producing downstream. In the downstream markets, a multiproduct firm is both a monopoly in its own product and a leader in a different product market with free entry of followers. We show that in the presence of scale economies, entry is socially insufficient. The insufficiency of entry is due to the fact that entry generates a business-creating effect significantly large enough to dominate a business-stealing effect, regardless of whether the upstream supplier's input pricing strategy is discriminatory or uniform. This suggests that entry regulation as a public policy is socially undesirable in the downstream oligopoly of a vertical market structure. My second essay examines differences in welfare implications between discriminatory and uniform input price regimes in vertically related markets where a multiproduct firm operates downstream in two separate markets: one is a monopoly and the other is an oligopoly with entry of new firms. In the analysis, we analyze how the downstream entry into the oligopolistic market affects social efficiency. In an open economy, whether the input price regime is discriminatory or uniform, entry is always socially excessive in the presence of scale economies. This contrasts with the existing studies in the literature that entry is always socially insufficient in an open economy with the presence of scale economies. Focusing on the scenario where vertically integrated producer (VIP) adopts a non-foreclosure strategy, my third essay shows that downstream entry is socially insufficient despite scale economies and the marginal cost difference between the VIP and its retail competitors. The non-foreclosure equilibrium arises when the VIP's wholesale profit from the sales of an essential input is sufficiently large and the VIP shares the profit with its downstream competitors. For the case of an open economy where the VIP is a foreign firm, downstream entry continues to be socially insufficient. Entry regulation is therefore socially undesirable, but a production subsidy encouraging downstream entry is shown to be a welfare-improving policy.

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

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are the common workhorse of modern macroeconomic theory. Whereas story-telling and policy analysis were in the forefront of applications since its inception, the forecasting perspective of DSGE models is only recently topical. In this study, we perform a post-mortem analysis of the predictive power of DSGE models in the case of Austria's Great Recession in 2009. For this purpose, eight DSGE models with different characteristics (small and large models; closed and open economy models; one and two-country models) were used. The initial hypothesis was that DSGE models are inferior in ex-ante forecasting a crisis. Surprisingly however, it turned out that not all but those models which implemented features of the causes of the global financial crisis (like financial frictions or interbank credit flows) could not only detect the turning point of the Austrian business cycle early in 2008 but they also succeeded in forecasting the following severe recession in 2009. In comparison, non-DSGE methods like the ex-ante forecast with the Global Economic (Macro) Model of Oxford Economics and WIFO's expert forecasts performed comparable or better than most DSGE models in the crisis.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第22682号 / 経博第618号 / 新制||経||293(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 柴田 章久, 准教授 高橋 修平, 教授 佐々木 啓明, 教授 敦賀 貴之(大阪大学) / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DGAM

This thesis analyzes the incomplete exchange rate pass-through effect on Mongolian economy and its implication on monetary policy under foreign and domestic shocks. The analysis is carried out in a small open economy New Keynesian DSGE model proposed by Monacelli (2005), where incomplete exchange rate pass-through is introduced via nominal rigidities on import prices. In order to accomplish the goal, we firstly derive the solutions of the model, calibrate the parameters, and finally simulate the impulse responses. Moreover, SVAR estimation is achieved to estimate the pass-through. Four main results are obtained. First, the exchange rate pass-through into import price and inflation is 0.69% and 0.49% respectively in short run, implying incomplete pass-through in Mongolia. Second, the exchange rate acts as a shock absorber for domestic productivity and foreign demand shock, but as a shock amplifier for domestic demand shock. Third, in case of incomplete pass-through the central bank of Mongolia is required to adjust the nominal interest rate more under the productivity shock, but less for the domestic and foreign demand shock. Finally, deviations from the law of one price contributes considerably to the variability of the output gap under the low pass-through. Therefore, considering incomplete pass-through in...