No description available.

No description available.

The following paper assesses a statistical relationship between Economic Inequality and Voting Participation among a sizable amount of nations across the world representing all continents. With an deductive approach, three theoretical standpoints of interest are presented: one that describes a negative, another inconclusive, and one with a positive relationship between the variables of interest. Through panel data analysis the study finds support in favour of a negative relationship in that as economic inequality rises, voting participation in parliamentary elections decreases.

Thesis advisor: Sanjay Chugh / This dissertation studies unemployment---both its micro-level contours and its macro-level fluctuations---from a search-theoretic perspective. Guided by the structure of search theory, each constituent chapter employs a different set of empirical tools to confront a fundamental aspect of joblessness. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Thesis advisor: Susanto Basu / Thesis advisor: Ryan Chahrour / This dissertation consists of three independent chapters analyzing the sources of business cycles and the role of monetary policy. Taking both closed- and open-economy perspectives, I study the importance of expectations for the empirical identification of economic and policy shocks, the nature of business cycle fluctuations, and the optimal conduct of monetary policy. The first chapter is titled ``International Spillovers and the Exchange Rate Channel of Monetary Policy,'' and is joint work with Vito Cormun. Motivated by the observation that exchange rate fluctuations largely influence small open economies, we propose a novel approach to separately identify the effects of domestic and external shocks on exchange rates and other macroeconomic variables, thereby uncovering a set of new empirical findings. A first finding is that external shocks account for most of exchange rate fluctuations. Relatedly, the bulk of external shocks is strongly correlated with measures of global risk aversion and uncertainty (e.g. the VIX), and a country’s net foreign asset position largely explains the exposure of its exchange rate to external disturbances. A second finding is that domestic and external disturbances generate very different comovement patterns between interest rates and exchange rates. In particular, unlike domestic shocks, external shocks are associated with large and significant deviations from uncovered interest parity. As a result, an econometrician that fails to properly distinguish between sources of exchange rate fluctuations is bound to obtain puzzling estimates of the exchange rate effects of domestic monetary policy shocks. These empirical findings have profound implications for models of small open economy and exchange rate determination. In particular, they favor theories in which exchange rates are jointly determined by the risk-bearing capacity in financial markets as well as the extent of a country’s financial imbalances. For this reason, we develop a model of the international financial sector that satisfies these features, and embed it in an otherwise standard general equilibrium two-country small open economy model. The key mechanism of the model consists of risk averse traders in the foreign exchange markets that require a premium to hold the currency risk of the small open economy. We show that the proposed model is able to reproduce all the empirical findings documented in the empirical analysis, including the cross-country differences in exposure to external shocks, the role of a country’s net foreign asset position, the different responses of interest rates, exchange rates, and currency excess returns across different shocks, as well as the emergence and resolution of the so-called exchange rate response puzzle across different identification approaches. The second chapter is titled ``Should Central Banks Target Investment Prices?'' and is joint work with Susanto Basu. The question posed in the title is motivated by the observation that central banks nearly always state explicit or implicit inflation targets in terms of consumer price inflation. To address the question, we develop an otherwise standard dynamic general equilibrium model with two production sectors. One sector produces consumption goods, while the other produces investment goods. In this context, we show that if there are nominal rigidities in the pricing of both consumption and investment goods and if the shocks to the two sectors are not identical, then monetary policy faces a tradeoff between targeting consumption price inflation and investment price inflation. In a model calibrated to replicate the estimated processes of sectoral total factor productivities as well as a set of unconditional business cycle moments, ignoring investment prices typically leads to substantial welfare losses because the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in investment is much higher than in consumption. Based on the model's predictions, we argue that a shift in monetary policy to targeting a weighted average of consumer and investment price inflation may produce significant welfare gains, although this would constitute a major change in current central banking practice. The third chapter is titled ``Information Acquisition and Self-Fulfilling Business Cycles,'' and is sole-authored work. To study the implications of imperfect information on economic fluctuations, I develop an otherwise standard Real Business Cycle model with endogenous information acquisition, which generates countecyclical firm-level uncertainty and endogenously procyclical productivity, as empirically documented in the literature. The main contribution of this chapter is the observation that this model displays aggregate increasing returns to scale and, potentially, an indeterminate dynamic equilibrium. In fact, an aggregate representation of the model is observationally equivalent to earlier theories of endogenous fluctuations based on increasing returns to scale, but its microeconomic foundations are consistent with empirically observed firm-level returns to scale. In a model calibrated to replicate a set of moments of the empirical distribution of firm-level productivity, self-fulfilling fluctuations are possible. In addition, a Bayesian estimation of the model suggests that non-fundamental shocks explain a significant fraction of aggregate fluctuations. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

In this dissertation, I examine three questions of relevance to macroeconomists. Chapter 1 investigates how the interconnected production and trade credit networks of firms lead to the propagation of financial shocks. Chapter 2 documents that conditional moments of the price change distribution are extremely informative and yield new insights on the dynamics of price changes in the economy. Chapter 3 offers a detailed investigation of the foreign exchange risk premium through the inflation-indexed bond market structure. In Chapter 1, I study the transmission of firm-level shocks in the economy. Firms are connected through the production network. At the same time, the production linkages coincide with financial linkages because of delays to input payments. Idiosyncratic shocks can spillover in the network through production and financial linkages among firms and generate aggregate economic fluctuations. Chapter 1 investigates how these interconnected production and financial linkages lead to the propagation of financial shocks both upstream and downstream. First, I show that financial shocks can propagate upstream if there are financial linkages of firms and financial frictions in trade. Second, I find, based on the input-output matrix and the bond yield data in the U.S., upstream propagation of financial shocks is stronger than downstream propagation. Third, I elaborate a DSGE model that can capture this pattern of shocks and generate quantitative predictions. Fourth, I demonstrate that credit policies would have a stronger impact if liquidity were transferred to downstream sectors after aggregate liquidity shocks. The second chapter documents the price setting behaviour of firms. The effectiveness of monetary policy depends both on the presence and the forms of nominal rigidities in price setting. Understanding the dynamics of price changes (when and how price changes) is necessary to determine the true degree of monetary non-neutrality. Chapter 2 shows that conditional moments, which have been seldom used, are extremely informative and yield new insights on the selection effect of price changes. It documents the predictions of a broad class of existing price setting models on how various statistics of the price change distribution change with the rate of aggregate inflation. Notably, menu cost models uniformly feature the price change distribution becoming less dispersed and less skewed as inflation rises, while in the Calvo model both relations are positive. Using a novel data set, the micro data underlying the U.S. CPI from the late 1970's onwards, Chapter 2 evaluates these predictions using the large variation in inflation over this period. Price change dispersion does indeed fall with inflation, but skewness does not, meaning that none of the existing models can fit these patterns. It then presents a model that does, in addition to matching the price change moments that existing models do. The model features random menu costs. With a menu cost distribution that gives a significant probability to free price changes, and a high probability to very high menu costs, the model predicts a flat inflation-skewness relation. This menu cost distribution moves the model close to a Calvo model, and the model therefore exhibits a much higher degree of monetary non-neutrality than the Golosov and Lucas (2007) model, and higher even than in the subsequent menu cost models such as Midrigan (2011). Finally, the last chapter investigates an important input in firms' and households' investment decisions process - risk premium of the foreign exchange market. Risk premium in the foreign exchange market has been a prominent research topic in international macroeconomics for decades. For example, it plays an important role in explaining the well-known interest parity puzzle and in investigating the foreign exchange market structure. Chapter 3 offers a detailed investigation of the foreign exchange risk premium using a novel structural relationship in the inflation-index bond market, firstly introduced by Clarida (2012). Unlike the conventional VAR approach, this approach estimates risk premium through the non-arbitrage relationship between investing inflation-indexed bonds from two countries and works on the market information set. There are two main findings. First, the estimated risk premium is able to forecast subsequent exchange rate changes. Second, contrary to the original finding of Meese and Rogoff (1983) that, even given the ex post realizations of fundamentals, exchange rate changes are difficult to explain, there are in fact periods in which exchange rate movements are driven largely by the fluctuation in the fair value.

My dissertation studies the impact of banks on macroeconomic outcomes. Chapter 1 explores the effects of bond market growth on the financing decisions of firms, the lending behavior of banks, and the resulting equilibrium allocation of credit and capital. This chapter makes three contributions to understand the impact of bond market liberalization. First, using evidence from reforms in Japan that gave borrowers selective access to bond markets during the 1980s, it shows that firms that obtained access to the bond market used bond issuance to pay back bank debt. More importantly, this large, positive funding shock led banks to increase lending to small and medium enterprises and real estate firms. Second, it proposes a model of financial frictions that is consistent with the empirical findings, and uses the model to derive general conditions under which bond liberalization has this effect on banks. The model predicts that bond liberalization can significantly worsen the quality of the pool of bank borrowers, and so lower bank profitability. These results suggest that Japan's bond market liberalization contributed to both the real estate bubble in the 1980s and bank problems in the 1990s. Third, the model implies that bond markets amplify the effects of shocks to the risk-free rate and firm borrowing, in addition to attenuating the effects of financial shocks. In Chapter 2, I explore how the incentives of domestic banks and sovereign governments interact. I build a model of government default and banks that invest in the debt of their own sovereign. In the model, banks demand safe assets to use as collateral, and default affects bank equity. These losses inhibit banks' ability to attract deposits, leading to lower private credit provision, and lower output. This disincentivizes the sovereign from defaulting. The extent of output losses depends on characteristics of the banking system, including sovereign exposures, equity, and deposits. In turn, bank exposures are affected by default risk. The model is also used to show that policies such as financial repression can improve welfare, but worsen output losses in the event of default, and may also worsen losses in some non-default states. Underlying much research on the role of financial intermediaries in macroeconomics is an implicit recognition that there is matching between banks and firms, which I turn to in Chapter 3. Matching between banks and firms has implications for both the transmission of macroeconomic shocks and for empirical estimates of the effects of such shocks. This paper presents a theory of matching in corporate loan markets, between heterogeneous banks and heterogenous firms. The model demonstrates how assortative matching can cause shocks to have distributional consequences, where particular types of banks and firms are disproportionately affected. The framework is used to show (1) why growth without financial development is limited, (2) how capital inflows affect bank and firm outcomes, and (3) how financial regulation for certain banks also has implications for other borrowers and lenders. Further, this theory demonstrates that matching in corporate lending markets is analytically tractable, and generates predictions that are consistent with existing empirical evidence.

No description available.

This thesis studies the factors driving the movement of Myanmar’s reference exchange rate against the dollar during its managed-float currency regime from 2012 to 2018. Time series and event study analysis are used to assess how reforms have affected the value of the Myanmar Kyat. The exchange rate policies and movements of nearby Asian currencies over the same sample period are also considered to determine whether the depreciation of the Myanmar Kyat parallels that of the others (Chinese Renminbi, Vietnamese Dong, Thai Baht, Cambodian Riel, and Singaporean dollar). The results show that the Myanmar Kyat is significantly influenced by US inflation and the Myanmar’s 2015 general elections, and that the Kyat is indirectly influenced by the Renminbi and the USD, through the currencies’ effects on the Dong. Comparing the M2/GDP and stock market capitalization to GDP ratios showed that Myanmar’s market lags behind its Asian counterparts. However, the government treasury bond market launched in September 2016 and the stock exchange launched in December 2015 offer hope for secondary trading and a deepening of the financial sector in the future.

This dissertation consists of three essays in Macroeconomics. The first essay assesses the impact of offshoring on aggregate productivity and on labour market outcomes by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which workers acquire task-specific human capital. The dynamic nature of the model allows for differentiation between short and long run effects. While the welfare effects are unambiguously positive and independent of the skill-content of the offshored and inshored tasks, the distribution of the gains from trade critically depends on the time horizon. Workers with human capital specific to the inshored tasks gain over those performing offshored tasks in the short term. In the long run, the gains from trade are equally distributed among ex-ante identical agents. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy; welfare gains from increased offshoring are found to be substantial even after taking into account losses in specific human capital for workers in the offshored occupations along the transition path. The second essay integrates the insight that exporting firms are typically more productive and employ higher skilled workers into a directed search model of the labour market. The model generates a skill premium as well as residual wage inequality among identical workers. Trade liberalization will cause a reallocation of workers both within and across industries, which will affect both types of inequality in a way that is consistent with findings from the empirical literature on trade and inequality. A calibrated version of the model can account for much of the effect of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement on the Canadian labour market. The final essay incorporates a distortionary tax into the microfoundations of money framework and revisits the optimum quantity of money. An optimal policy may consist of both a positive tax rate and a positive nominal interest rate: if the buyer's surplus share is inefficiently small, the intensive margin is distorted and the constrained optimal policy combines a sales tax with a money growth rate above that prescribed by the Friedman rule. Monetary, but not fiscal, policy alters the agent's bargaining position, leaving a special role for a deviation from the Friedman rule.