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This dissertation consists of three essays on the sources and desirability of economic fluctuations. Chapter 1 focuses on a source of fluctuations that has long been attached to the history of economic thought on business cycles: sticky prices. I provide a microfounded theory for one of the oldest, but so far informal, explanations of price rigidity: the kinked demand curve theory. Assuming that some customers observe at no cost only the price of the store they happen to be at gives rise to a kink in firms' demand curves: a price increase above the market price repels more customers than a price decrease attracts. The kink in turn makes a range of prices consistent with equilibrium, but an intuitive criterion---the adaptive rational-expectations criterion---selects a unique equilibrium where prices stay constant for a long time. The kinked-demand theory is consistent with price-setters' account of price-rigidity as arising from the customer's---not the firm's---side, and can be tested against menu-cost models in micro data: it predicts that prices should be more likely to change if they have recently changed, and that prices should be more flexible in markets where customers can more easily compare prices. The kinked-demand theory has novel implications for monetary policy: its Phillips curve is strongly convex but does not contain any (present or past) expectations of inflation; its trade-off between output and inflation persists in the long-run; changes to the distribution of sectoral productivity shift the Phillips curve; and monetary shocks have a much longer-lasting real effect than in a menu-cost model, despite also being a model of state-dependent pricing. Chapter 2, written with Emi Nakamura and J\'on Steinsson, starts from the assumption of nominal rigidities---asymmetric wage rigidity this time---to investigate the welfare costs of business cycles. We document that the dynamics of unemployment fit what Milton Friedman labeled a plucking model: a rise in unemployment is followed by a fall of similar amplitude, but the amplitude of the rise does not depend on the previous fall. We develop a microfounded plucking model of the business cycle to account for these phenomena. The model features downward nominal wage rigidity within an explicit search model of the labor market. Our search framework implies that downward nominal wage rigidity is fully consistent with optimizing behavior and equilibrium. We reassess the costs of business cycle fluctuations through the lens of the plucking model. Contrary to New-Keynesian models where fluctuations are cycles around an average natural rate, the plucking model generates fluctuations that are gaps below potential (as in Old-Keynesian models). In this model, business cycle fluctuations raise not only the volatility but also the average level of unemployment, and stabilization policy can reduce the average level of unemployment and therefore yield sizable welfare benefits. Chapter 3 is a contribution to a second branch of Keynesian economics, which sees the possibility of inefficient economic fluctuations not as a consequence of sticky prices, but instead as a more intrinsic property of a system of decentralized production. I ask: how do agents coordinate in a world that they do not fully understand? I consider a dispersed-information coordination game with ambiguity-averse agents who do not trust their models. Because distinguishing models is harder in a noisier economy, the model is one of endogenous ambiguity. Because one agent's noise is another's private information, one agent's reliance on his private information increases how much ambiguity his neighbor faces. I revisit the role of private and public information in this new light. On the positive side, I show that the equilibrium depends less on fundamentals as agents become more ambiguity averse, and not at all in the limit where they become infinitely so. I also show that, because it makes agents trust their model more, the release of public information drives the economy toward fundamentals whenever ambiguity-aversion is high enough, in contrast to the standard result under rational expectations. On the normative side, I show that the equilibrium features too much dependence on fundamentals: agents would rather live in a world that they understand better, even if it means living in a world that is less responsive to changes in fundamentals.

Writers on the business cycle often emphasize that non-linear models are needed to account for certain of its features. Thus it is often said that either the asymmetry of the duration of business cycle expansions and contractions or the variability of these quantities demand a non-linear model. Such comments are rarely made precise however and mostly consist of references to such assertions from the past. Thus the asymmetry in the cycle is mostly accompanied by references to Keynes (1936) and Burns and Mitchell (1946). But these authors were looking at what we call today the classical cycle i.e. movements in the level of GDP, and so the fact that there are long expansions and short contractions can arise simply due to the presence of long-run growth in the economy, and it is not obvious that it has much to do with non-linearity. This thesis aims to introduce various statistics that can be used to characterise the specific shape of the non-linearity observed in macroeconomic time series. Chapter 2 introduces a range of statistics and presents the dating algorithm used in this thesis, which is based on the BBQ algorithm of Harding and Pagan (2002). Chapter 3 tests the adequacy of linear models versus the SETAR model of van Dijk and Franses(2003) and the bounceback model of Kim, Morley and Piger (2005) in capturing observed non-linear features of the data. Chapter 4 extends this work by examining the three state Markov model of Hamilton (1989), again using the ??bounce-back?? model of Kim C., Morley, J. and J. Piger, (2005), and the more complicated ??tension?? model of DeJong, D., Dharmarajan, H., Liesenfeld, R. and Richard, J., (2005). Chapter 4 also extends Chapter 3 by estimating the above mentioned models on US GDP, Australian non-farm GDP, US investment and Australian dwellings investment. They are then simulated in order to gauge the cycle properties. Chapter 5 analyses the business cycle implications of two related multivariate dynamic factor models presented in papers by Kim and Piger (2001, 2002). Finally Chapter 6 concludes.

This thesis examines the difference between the extracted cyclical components of some macroeconomic time series using four popular detrending methods HP, BK, CF and FOD. We use different approaches to compare their differences. A standard examination of the cyclical component is applied. We also take a frequency domain approach and examine the sample spectra for each cycle. Moreover, impulse responses and the correlation between the cyclical components extracted by each detrending method are studied. We conclude that for quarterly data HP, BK and CF produce similar cycles. However, when considering annual data the HP diverges from the other filters. The FOD extracts cycles that are not similar to those of the other three examined filters.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Stefan C. Norrbin, Florida State University, College of Social Sciences, Dept. of Economics. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 16, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Marburg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. i-xxiii).

Proefschrift--Utrecht. / "Stellingen" ([3] p.) laid in. "Geciteerde literatuur": p. 179-181.

The stylized fact of co-movement of lending and economic activity has been widely interpreted as evidence of a destabilizing feedback mechanism between the banking and real sectors, suggesting the special role of credit supply in amplifying financial and macroeconomic instability. Indeed, this “procyclicality” view significantly influences bank regulations internationally. Under the Basel III, the countercyclical capital buffer is exclusively designed to dampen the volatility of credit supply over the business cycle. The strong co-movement of lending and economic activity, however, is insufficient to confirm the existence of the procyclicality, given that both demand and supply of loans decline during economic downturns. If loan supply does not play a causal role, then any measure to strengthen lending capacity of banks would be ineffective in addressing this procyclicality issue. The literature, however, provides limited, otherwise inexistent, cross-country evidence to answer these fundamental questions. This research gap calls into question the sufficiency of international evidence to assess the effectiveness of the new capital measure, and more broadly, the regulatory reform. This cross-country econometric study covering 39 economies for the period 1990– 2009 examines these fundamental issues in detail. There are three main findings and policy implications. For banking stability, a significant procyclical pattern of loan supply exists, and such pattern is negatively associated with bank capital. These findings together support the view that the countercyclical capital buffers of Basel III could be effective tools for dampening loan volatility over the business cycle. For the regulatory reform, there is prevalent evidence that capital and liquidity are determinants of loan supply. This finding bears out the main Basel III argument that stronger capital and liquidity could strengthen the resilience of the global banking sector to macroeconomic shocks. For macroeconomic stability, empirical findings suggest a moderate macroeconomic effect of loan supply, particularly for developed economies. However, the finding does not imply a small impact of banking instability on the real sector. In fact, banking crises are estimated to have a larger independent negative effect on economic growth after controlling for the macroeconomic effect through impacts of banking crises on loan supply. There are two main policy implications of these findings. First, the main channel through which stronger capital and liquidity of banks help reduce macroeconomic instability would have an impact on reducing the likelihood of the occurrence of a banking crisis. Second, during non-crisis periods, bank regulations aiming at smoothing loan supply may have a relatively moderate impact on reducing macroeconomic instability. For policy to address banking procyclicality, the results show that aside from higher quantitative capital and liquidity requirements, more stringent definitions of capital could dampen loan supply procyclicality, which speaks in favor of recent policy initiatives to strengthen the quality of regulatory capital. More stringent bank regulations are also found to reduce loan supply procyclicality in countries with deposit insurance schemes. To reduce the propagations of loan supply shocks to the real sector, policy to improve the breadth of the stock market and the size of the domestic bond market would be useful. / published_or_final_version / Economics and Finance / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation investigates several business cycle relationships when economic agents are heterogeneous. The particular focus is on the interactions between the cross-section of agents and the aggregate state of the economy. The first chapter shows that, when occasionally binding capacity constraints limit the production of heterogeneous firms, demand shocks can endogenously generate a number of important business cycle regularities: recessions are deeper than booms are high, firm-level volatility is countercyclical, the aggregate Solow residual is procyclical and the fiscal multiplier is countercyclical. A baseline calibration of a basic New Keynesian DSGE model with capacity constraints shows that this mechanism can explain more than a quarter of the empirically observed asymmetry in output, and matches the cyclicality of firm-level profitability dispersion and of the measured Solow residual. The model implies fluctuations in the fiscal multiplier of around 0.12 between expansions and recessions. Chapter two takes a different approach to firm level uncertainty, exploring how recessions can cause an endogenous rise in firm risk. If heterogeneous firms face real and financial frictions, then a shock to the mean of aggregate productivity endogenously leads to countercyclical profitability risk through firms' heterogeneous responses in price setting. Additionally, the mechanism endogenously generates countercyclical credit spreads and credit spread dispersion. The model explains a large share of the observed fluctuations in profitability dispersion (69%) and in credit spreads (40%) through fluctuations in aggregate TFP holding productivity risk constant. This suggests that the scope for uncertainty shocks to explain recessions may be smaller than previously thought. The third chapter focuses on distributional effects of oil price shocks on the household side. In the model, household behavior replicates two patterns found in household-level data which show that gas consumption increases with income, but on the intensive margin gasoline consumption as a share of the household's budget decreases with income. The model includes gas consumption in household utility on top of a fixed minimum level of gas consumption. Calibrated simulations suggest that a shock to the gas price is almost twice as costly for relatively poor households than for relatively rich households. / text

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