Essays on Consumption, Savings and International Finance

Essays on Consumption, Savings and International Finance PDF Author: Shouyong.* Shi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Essays on Consumption, Savings and International Finance

Essays on Consumption, Savings and International Finance PDF Author: Shouyong.* Shi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description


Essays in Macroeconomics of an Open Economy

Essays in Macroeconomics of an Open Economy PDF Author: Franz Gehrels
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642956599
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The large aggregates in the economy - consumption, investment, production of the domestic and the international sectors, international capital flows, financial accumulation and indebtedness - are analysed in this book as problems in time-optimisation for enterprises and households. The effects of fiscal and monetary policies along with exchange-rate variation are examined, and their simultaneous use for stabilizing demand are found to be necessary. All household decisions on consumptions, savings, and financial disposition are conditioned by uncertainty, and similarly for firms, who make more complex simultaneous decisions on production, real investment, financing, and market strategy. The marginal efficiency-of-investment function derived from these decisions is fundamentally different from the marginal productivity of capital in the neoclassical sense. An economy which grows through the accumulation of capital, increase in labor supply, and technological progress is the framework in which all of these variables move. This codetermines the allocation of factors between domestic and international production, and the development of foreign trade. The growth both of the public debt and of international investment are treated in depth.

International Monetary Problems and Supply-Side Economics

International Monetary Problems and Supply-Side Economics PDF Author: G. Harcourt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 134918392X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Money, Crises, and Transition

Money, Crises, and Transition PDF Author: Guillermo A. Calvo
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
The essays taken on the issues that have fascinated Calvo most as an academic, a senior advisor at the International Monetary Fund and as the chief economist at the Inter-American Development Bank: monetary and exchange rate policy, financial crises, debt, taxation and reform, and transition and growth.

International Handbook of Financial Literacy

International Handbook of Financial Literacy PDF Author: Carmela Aprea
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811003602
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Book Description
This Handbook presents in-depth research conducted on a myriad of issues within the field of financial literacy. Split into six sections, it starts by presenting prevalent conceptions of financial literacy before covering financial literacy in the policy context, the state and development of financial literacy within different countries, issues of assessment and evaluation of financial literacy, approaches to teaching financial literacy, and teacher training and teacher education in financial literacy. In doing so, it provides precise definitions of the construct of financial literacy and elaborates on the state and recent developments of financial literacy around the world, to show ways of measuring and fostering financial literacy and to give hints towards necessary and successful teacher trainings. The book also embraces the diversity in the field by revealing contrasting and conflicting views that cannot be bridged, while at the same time making a contribution by re-joining existing materials in one volume which can be used in academic discourse, in research-workshops, in university lectures and in the definition of program initiatives within the wider field of financial literacy. It allows for a landscape of financial literacy to be depicted which would foster the implementation of learning opportunities for human beings for sake of well-being within financial living-conditions. The Handbook is useful to academics and students of the topic, professionals in the sector of investment and banking, and for every person responsible for managing his or her financial affairs in everyday life.

World Finance and Economic Stability

World Finance and Economic Stability PDF Author: James Tobin
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Nobel Prize winner James Tobin has made outstanding contributions to modern macroeconomics. In this final collection of his work he examines the economic policies of the United States and its relations with other major economies after 1990. In James Tobin's view, the welfare of populations depends uniquely on these policies and it is important to be aware of their impact. This book brings together James Tobin's recent work, both published and unpublished, on finance and globalization, currency crises and bailouts. Emphasis is placed on international economic relations and policies, and on the IMF and World Bank. In particular, economic and monetary relations among nations, exchange rate problems and policies and the 'Tobin Tax' - popular in Europe but much misunderstood - are discussed. Professor Tobin also examines the impact of his earlier work on recent US fiscal policy. The Clinton administration followed a tight fiscal policy leading to budget surpluses, and this enabled Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve to follow an 'easy', low interest rate, monetary policy. This mix was advocated back in the 1950s and 1960s by Paul Samuelson and James Tobin. The memo Professor Tobin wrote for the J.F. Kennedy campaign of 1960 is published for the first time. The policy was not applied until 30-35 years later. Presenting a framework for understanding monetary and fiscal policies and how they determine full employment and growth, the book will prove invaluable to students and scholars of macroeconomics, as well as economists wishing to gain an insight into Professor Tobin's unique contribution to economics.

Essays in Macro-finance

Essays in Macro-finance PDF Author: Jiwei Zhang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of four essays in macro-finance, focusing on the cause and effect of asset prices, inequality, and welfare. In particular, these essays highlight the role of institutions and structural changes in shaping outcomes of asset markets and of the macro-economy. The two overarching objectives of these essays are to analyze mechanisms of asset price movements and to understand how these asset price movements affect the daily lives of people. The four chapters of this dissertation examine the implications of inertia and stock market non-participation for equity prices, risk sharing, and wealth inequality; causal effects of Chinese Communist Party's cadre promotion system on land prices in China; interconnection between homeownership and marriage; fiscal responses to income inequality shocks. The first chapter quantifies the general equilibrium effects of financial innovation that increases access to equity markets. I study an overlapping generations model with both idiosyncratic and aggregate risk, solved with machine learning techniques. A benchmark economy with limited stock market participation and rebalancing frictions matches the current dynamics of macro aggregates, equity and bond returns, as well as wealth and portfolio concentration. A counterfactual experiment shows how widespread adoption of target date funds would improve risk sharing, reduce inequality, and generate substantial welfare gains for households in the bottom 90% of wealth distribution. The equity premium drops from 6.4% to 1.7%, while the standard deviation of equity returns stabilizes from 21.9% to 14.6%. Welfare implications vary with risk aversion and age. In general, the bottom 90% benefit from improved access to equity markets and better risk sharing, while the top 10% su↵er losses in wealth accumulation. Outcomes are very close between an economy with target date funds and one without any participation costs or rebalancing frictions. The second chapter identifies the causal effect of the Chinese Communist Party's performance- based promotion system to the country's real estate boom from 2003 to 2015. City-level leaders prioritizing economic growth allocate land at discounted prices to industrial firms rather than housing developers. Our analysis reveals that personal connections with provincial superiors are crucial for promotion and hence affect local land and housing supply. When city leaders share the same hometown as newly appointed provincial leaders, their chances of promotion increase by 15%, and GDP performances no longer matters. This connection reduces the need for industrial land allocation, resulting in a higher residential land supply in the city. In addition, cities with leaders who have hometown connections experience significantly higher supplies of residential land, and housing price growth rates are also 5% lower in these cities. The third chapter studies the phenomenon of marriage house in China and its effects on demo- graphics and homeownership. We first show empirical evidence for the complementarity between marriage and homeownership: single males with a marriage house (a house where the newlywed can move into) have 70% higher odds of getting married compared to their counterparts who do not have a marriage house. In addition, the timing of home purchase exhibits a clear cut-o↵ around the time of marriage, with the probability of purchasing a house peaking 0-2 years before marriage and slumping immediately after the time of marriage. Moreover, in the cross section, county house prices and average age at marriage are highly correlated in both level and in growth rate. We then quantify the marriage related incentives for homeownership using a lifecycle consumption-savings model with housing demand and ownership-dependent marriage shocks. In a counterfactual world where the marriage-house complementarity is absent, 45% of households under age 45 would delay their home purchases. Removing the marriage house friction from the marriage market would have slowed down the rise in age at first marriage by 40% between 1995 and 2010. Our results suggest that policies directed at either housing affordability or demographics can have significant consequences for both marriage and housing markets in China. Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over the last quarter century, the fourth chapter estimates a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income distribution changes and account for reverse causality using instruments based on exposure to international trade shocks, international commodity price shocks and national industry demand shocks, as well as lagged endogenous variables, with controls for the level of income, the business cycle and demographics. We find attenuation initially increases in quintile rank, peaks at the middle quintile and then falls for higher income quintiles, consistent with median voter political economy theory and the Stiglitz Director's law. We also provide evidence of considerable and systematic spillover effects on quintiles neither gaining nor losing in the "experiments, " also favoring the middle quintile. "Voting" and "income insurance" coalition analyses are presented. We find a strong negative relationship between average real income and the degree to which taxes and transfers are heavily redistributive.

Further Essays in Monetary Economics

Further Essays in Monetary Economics PDF Author: Harry Gordon Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description


Three Essays in the Microeconomics of Savings and Consumption

Three Essays in the Microeconomics of Savings and Consumption PDF Author: Joshua Junshik Kim
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation, "Three Essays in the Microeconomics of Savings and Consumption", is comprised of three chapters which together, focus on how low-income communities and households living in the developing world make important savings and consumption decisions. The first chapter, titled "Currency Depreciations and Savings Behavior: Evidence from Household Deposits in Armenia", is co-authored with Diego Jimenez-Hernandez and Aleksandr Shirkhanyan. In this chapter, I study how households living in financially dollarized economies make currency and savings decisions following a significant currency depreciation. Those living in the developing world often face the problem of how to safely store their assets when the value of their local currency is unstable. This instability leads to several complicated decisions households must make, such as how much to save and which currencies to save in. These choices are especially important for households during periods of macroeconomic volatility such as currency depreciations. This chapter studies how households make such savings decisions following a large currency depreciation in Armenia. We exploit the unique structure of Armenian financial instruments, which generates quasi-random variation in which savers are nudged into paying attention to the depreciation. We then study how this random difference in initial attention affects the future savings choices that individuals make. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that individuals who received a nudge to pay attention to the currency depreciation significantly reduced their total savings, held their savings for shorter periods of time, and chose to save their assets in USD. We find that these effects are strongest for individuals who predominantly saved their in the domestic currency and individuals who are less financially sophisticated. We also find that while some of the differences in savings decisions are temporary, others persist long after the original depreciation event. The second chapter, "Are High-Interest Loans Predatory? Theory and Evidence from Payday Lending", evaluates the welfare impacts of payday loans and payday lending regulation. It is often argued that consumer lending regulations can increase welfare, because high-interest loans cause "debt traps" where people borrow more than they expect or would like to in the long run. We test this using an experiment with a large payday lender. While the most inexperienced quartile of borrowers underestimate their likelihood of future borrowing, the more experienced three quartiles predict correctly on average. This finding contrasts sharply with priors we elicited from 103 payday lending and behavioral economics experts, who believed that the average borrower would be highly overoptimistic about getting out of debt. Borrowers are willing to pay a significant premium for an experimental incentive to avoid future borrowing, implying that they perceive themselves to be time-inconsistent. We combine these data with a novel sufficient statistic-based identification strategy to estimate a a structural model of time preferences and beliefs. Using our estimated parameters, we carry out a behavioral welfare evaluation of common payday lending regulations. In our model, payday loan bans unambiguously reduce welfare, and limits on repeat borrowing generate at best small welfare gains. The last chapter, "Food Labeling: Effects on Supply and Demand", studies front of package labeling regulations. Front-of-package labeling (FoPL) regulations are an increasingly popular policy used to combat obesity. FoPLs place warning stickers on food products which are deemed to be unhealthy. However, the welfare consequences of FoPL regulations are ambiguous; while firms may produce healthier foods to avoid receiving a label, they may also increase prices due to higher production costs and increased product differentiation. We study how FoPL regulations impact consumer surplus and nutritional intake in the context of Chile, which passed a nationwide regulation mandating FoPL stickers on all processed food products which surpass a threshold level of critical nutrients such as calories or sugar. Combining detailed scanner-level data from Walmart and field-collected data on products' nutritional content and consumers beliefs, we find a decrease in sugar and caloric intake by 9% and 7% respectively. We find that consumers shifted demand from labeled to unlabeled products, and this substitution is highest for products which consumers had miscalibrated nutritional beliefs about. On the supply side, we find firms bunch the nutritional composition of their products at the regulatory thresholds to avoid receiving a label. We develop and estimate a model of supply and demand for food and nutrients, and find that accounting for strategic responses from firms increases the effect of FoPL regulations on nutritional intake by 20 to 30 percent. Finally, we compare FoPL with sin taxes.

Money, Capital, & Fluctuations

Money, Capital, & Fluctuations PDF Author: F.A. Hayek
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226321274
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 1. THE MONETARY POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE RECOVERY FROM THE 1920 CRISIS (1925) 2. SOME REMARKS ON THE PROBLEM OF IMPUTATION (1926) 3. ON THE PROBLEM OF THE THEORY OF INTEREST (1927) 4. INTERTEMPORAL PRICE EQUILIBRIUM AND MOVEMENTS IN THE VALUE OF MONEY (1928) 5. THE FATE OF THE GOLD STANDARD (1932) 6. CAPITAL CONSUMPTION (1932) 7. ON 'NEUTRAL MONEY' (1933) 8. TECHNICAL PROGRESS AND EXCESS CAPACITY (1936) Two reviews MARGINAL UTILITY AND ECONOMIC CALCULATION (1925) THE EXCHANGE VALUE OF MONEY (1929) NAME INDEX