Thesis advisor: Matteo Iacoviello / This thesis focuses on investment, regulation and labor market frictions. The first paper is motivated by lumpiness of investment activity at the plant level. Investment episodes at firm level happen in lumps, period of great activity and periods of inaction. Previous research has suggested that, in a general equilibrium framework, accounting for such microeconomic behavior is irrelevant for explaining aggregate investment (Thomas (2002)). This paper re-evaluates previous findings in a two-sector economy, where non-convex costs of capital adjustment apply to each sector. Calibrating the model to be consistent with microeconomic evidence, I find that lumpy investment is relevant for the business cycle. Through limited intersectoral mobility of capital, non-convex capital adjustment costs impact the relative price of investment generating a synchronization of investment decisions at sectoral level. As a result, aggregate investment is amplified relative to neoclassical benchmarks in response to an aggregate productivity shock. In a one-sector model this mechanism is absent, since intersectoral capital mobility is perfect and the relative price of investment is independent from non-convex capital adjustment costs. In an empirical investigation of the model using 2-digit SIC industry data, I find evidence that sectoral measures of capital distribution forecast aggregate investment. The second paper investigates the effect of product market liberalization on employment and considers possible interactions between policies and institutions in product and labor markets. Using panel data for OECD countries over the period 1980-2002, we present evidence that product market deregulation is more effective at the margin when labor market regulation is high. The data also suggest that product market deregulation promotes labor market deregulation. These results are consistent with the basic predictions of a standard bargaining model, such as Blanchard and Giavazzi (2003), extended to allow for a richer specification of the fall back position of the union. In the third paper, we start from evidence that most countries in the Euro Area are characterized by high product (PMR) and labor market (LMR) regulation. We then study long and short to medium run macroeconomic effects of reforming PMR and LMR by developing a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring endogenous producers entry and labor market frictions. We show that lowering PMR would increase steady state employment, wages and GDP but aggregate consumption would drop in the aftermath of the reform. Deregulating labor markets presents a less significant intertemporal trade off. Lower unemployment benefits would increase employment and GDP but reduce wages both in the short and long run. Smaller firing costs would trigger a positive effect on producers entry on impact, but employment and GDP would be negatively affected as time passes by. Regulation has also consequences for the business cycles properties of the economy. Lower barriers to entry and smaller unemployment benefits tend to smooth out aggregate fluctuations, while firing costs have a reverse effect. With a counterfactual exercise, we show that if the Euro Area would deregulate both product and labor markets at the US level it would adjust differently to aggregate shocks. A more flexible Euro Area would be more responsive to exogenous disturbances and the reversion to the steady state would be quicker. Our findings point out that concerns about the negative effect of strict regulation for the speed of recovery from downturns could be well placed, consistently with the idea that the European economy might be dynamically sclerotic. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_101534 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Fiori, Giuseppe |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. |
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