Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Markets and Political Processes

Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Markets and Political Processes PDF Author:
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Category : Labor economics
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Markets and Political Processes

Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Markets and Political Processes PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor economics
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Labor Markets and Political Processes

Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Labor Markets and Political Processes PDF Author:
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Category : Economic policy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Labor Markets and Political Processes

Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Labor Markets and Political Processes PDF Author: University of Rochester
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Labor Markets and Political Processes

Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Labor Markets and Political Processes PDF Author: Karl Brunner
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Category : Economic policy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Essays in Monetary Policy and Financial Markets

Essays in Monetary Policy and Financial Markets PDF Author: Fatma S. Tepe
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Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation examines the interaction between macroeconomic aggregates and financial markets in two different essays. The expansion of derivatives markets has prompted interest in estimating options-implied measures to analyze market participants’ beliefs about future movements in the prices of these derivatives’ underlying assets and the probability these participants assign to unlikely events (see Datta et al., 2014). In this spirit, analyzing oil market is important for two main reasons. First, among all commodities, crude oil futures and derivatives are the most traded and liquid asset in the whole commodity market. Second, the informational content of oil derivatives can be indicative of shifts in global economic expectations which may be of interests to producers, investors and policy makers. Because the risk neutral density (RND, hereafter) consists of information from various option series that have a wide range of strike prices and maturities, we can conjecture more detailed effects of news announcements on market sentiment by investigating the changes in the RND. Chapter 1 links the crude oil market to macroeconomic risk by studying the RND around the U.S. macroeconomic news announcements. I use a non-parametric method to recover the RND and conduct regression analysis using daily data. The analysis provides several noteworthy results. First, I find that the RND is systematically affected by certain macroeconomic news announcements. Second, after controlling for the content of the news, my results indicate that good news tend to make the distribution less negatively skewed, whereas bad news have an opposite effect. However, I do not find any systematic pattern between the content (bad/good) of the news and the implied volatility or kurtosis. Hence, my results show that better/worse-than-expected news in macroeconomic announcements may both increase and decrease implied volatility and kurtosis of the option implied distribution. Finally my estimates obtained from nonlinear regressions display that the magnitude of the surprise may play into this effect; for example worse-than-expected news in Housing Starts announcement decrease the implied volatility and increase the implied kurtosis only when the size of surprise is not too large. How should a central bank conduct monetary policy in the presence of financial shocks? In Chapter 2, I use different nonlinear policy rules and address this question. Most empirical work on monetary policy relies on simple linear policy rules, however it is not clear whether such a rule can be an adequate representation of a process as complex as that of monetary policy. I first estimate Markov Switching Taylor rules with constant transition probabilities to allow for state-contingent policy making during 1987.3-2008.4. As a proxy for financial stress, I use the Adjusted National Financial Conditions Index constructed by the Chicago Fed. Then, I allow transition probabilities driving the monetary policy stance to vary over time and be a function of economic and financial indicators. The paper provides clear-cut evidence that, during the Greenspan-Bernanke tenure, the U.S. monetary policy can be characterized falling into two distinct regimes; a conventional regime where the Fed puts a greater emphasis on targeting inflation while stabilizing the economic outlook and a distressed regime where the Fed responds aggressively to output gaps and is less concerned with inflation. The distressed regime is closely correlated with times of financial imbalances. The empirical results show that nonlinear models outperform the simple linear specification in terms of model fit and the ability to track the actual interest rate. Also, the economic and financial indicators are found to be informative in dating the evolution of the state of the monetary policy stance. The results have implications for nonlinear rules to be a useful guideline for forecasting and policy analysis.

Essays on Asset Prices and Macroeconomic News Announcements

Essays on Asset Prices and Macroeconomic News Announcements PDF Author: John Cong Zhou
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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My dissertation is composed of three chapters that are unified by their exploration of asset prices and macroeconomic news announcements. With respect to asset prices, my main focus is on the price discovery process: how do asset prices reveal information relevant for asset fundamentals? Through my research, I provide new answers to this question. My work gets at core issues in asset pricing: whether financial markets are informationally efficient; why some assets earn unconditionally high premia; and how the sensitivity of prices to information varies over time and across assets. Specifically, chapter one shows evidence that sophisticated traders with an informational advantage inefficiently impound their edge into the aggregate U.S. stock market and U.S. Treasury bonds. In chapter two, I explore a model in which investors are averse to ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) to explain why the equity premium is concentrated around specific events. Finally, chapter three investigates how the Federal Reserve's zero lower bound affects the response of asset prices, in particular interest rates, to information. Each of the three chapters explores the price discovery process using the unique setting of U.S. macroeconomic news announcements, which are made by government agencies and private-sector organizations and cover macroeconomic data on inflation, output, and unemployment. Analyzing financial markets in this setting deepens our understanding of how asset prices reflect information about macroeconomic fundamentals. At the same time, the results have macroeconomic implications; for example, the assumptions of monetary policy models in theory and the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy in practice.

Essays in Macroeconomics with Financial Frictions

Essays in Macroeconomics with Financial Frictions PDF Author: Juan M. Hernandez
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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How can governments design policies that alleviate the macroeconomic implications of financial frictions? This dissertation contributes to answer this question focusing on two aspects: international borrowing and crisis prevention at the country's level, and the impact of taxation and financial regulation on entrepreneurship at the agent's level. In the first chapter, debt crises arise from the incompleteness of sovereign debt markets: the government cannot credibly commit to repay or default in certain states of the world and this gives way to non-fundamental debt crises. In a strategic default environment, I show that international reserve holdings help to reduce the probability of these market-driven debt crises, advancing the theoretical literature that had struggled to explain why countries hold reserves while indebted. The results are consistent with previous empirical results that had shown countries with greater reserve holdings faced lower spreads in the sovereign debt markets, which is at odds with the previous theories. In the second chapter, a small open economy faces an aggregate borrowing constraint and the agents fail to internalize how their private borrowing decisions push the total debt towards the limit, making the current account adjustment more severe. We model the decentralized and planner's problem and find the optimal capital control policies, these are very effective to move the economy to the first-best scenario but also very hard to implement, given their state contingent nature. We then address the effectiveness of simpler policy rules, and find that they can bring welfare gains but had to be carefully designed. Finally, in the third chapter, the competition among investors for the most promising entrepreneurs, under adverse selection and limited liability, leads to an excessive entry into entrepreneurship activity and allocates resources to socially inefficient projects. We solve the optimal contracting problem and show that the inefficiency disappears if at least one of the next three is missing: competition in financial intermediation, adverse selection or limited liability. We also show that a small cost or fee per contract, like red-tape requirements, is enough to restore efficiency, making a case for financial regulation.

Essays in Macroeconomics, Financial Markets, and Epidemics

Essays in Macroeconomics, Financial Markets, and Epidemics PDF Author: Cesar Saturnino Salinas Depaz
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Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation consists of three chapters about how access to financial markets and composition of the labor market determine aggregate macroeconomic outcomes. The first chapter examines the macroeconomic consequences of credit uncertainty using a structural vector autoregression model with stochastic volatility (SVAR-SV). Credit supply conditions in the U.S. is captured by the banks' reports on how credit standards for approving loans have change over time (Bank Lending Standards). The empirical analysis shows that the volatility of macroeconomic and financial variables rises in response to an increase in the credit uncertainty shock. The economic activity falls and credit growth and related interest rates decrease persistently. Moreover, credit volatility shocks explain around 10% of the FEV of endogenous variables. A dissagregated analysis shows that the effect of these shocks are mainly explained by their effects on the corporate business sector. The second chapter studies the role of time-varying credit limits through the lens of a life cycle incomplete markets model calibrated for the U.S. Changes in credit card limits are explained by observable household characteristics and the estimated unobservable variation is quite large. The quantitative exercise shows that even though young households are more indebted in an economy with stochastic borrowing limits, aggregate consumption is not greatly affected by transitory or persistent shocks of this type. However, in the presence of these shocks, households lose the ability to self-insure against other uninsurable idiosyncratic shocks, e.g., labor income shocks. A disaggregated analysis shows that the loss of self-insurance capacity is mainly explained by the effects that stochastic borrowing limits have on the wealth distribution, the precautionary savings channel households have to face unexpected risks. The third chapter studies the role of informal markets to explain economic and demographic variables during a pandemic. The quantitative exercise shows that lockdown policies are less effective in economies with large informal markets, infection and death rates will not decrease as much as formal economies. Moreover, the size of the recession would be exacerbated because informal activities are not counted in the calculation of the GDP. To generate similar results to an economy with only formal markets, the economy with informal markets must implement more severe containment policies.

Essays on Macroeconomics with Financial Frictions

Essays on Macroeconomics with Financial Frictions PDF Author: Matthew Knowles
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Category : Banks and banking
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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"This dissertation consists of three essays concerning the macroeconomic implications of financial market frictions that limit the ability of firms to obtain external finance. Each of the three chapters employs a theoretical macroeconomic model, combined with some empirical analysis, to study unanswered questions in the literature related to the importance of these financial market frictions for the wider economy. The three chapters consider, in turn, the effect of banking crises on investment, output and employment, the implications of financial market frictions for optimal capital taxation, and the effect of banking deregulation on the distribution of income. The first chapter studies the long slumps in output and employment following banking crises. In a panel of OECD and emerging economies, I find that recessions are associated with larger initial drops in investment and more persistent drops in output if they occur simultaneously with banking crises. Furthermore, the banking crises that are followed by more persistent output slumps are associated with particularly large initial drops in investment. I show that these patterns can arise in a model where a financial shock temporarily increases the costs of external finance for investing entrepreneurs. This leads to a drop in investment and a persistent slump in output. Critical to the model is the distinction between different types of capital with different depreciation rates. Intangible capital and equipment have high depreciation rates, leading these stocks to drop substantially when investment falls after a financial shock. If wages display some rigidity, this induces a slump in output and employment that persists for roughly a decade, through the contribution of the decline in equipment and intangibles to declining production and labor demand. I find that this mechanism can account for almost a third of the persistent drop in output and employment in the US Great Recession (2007-2014). In the model, TFP and government spending shocks lead to relatively smaller declines in investment and less persistent drops in output; so the model is also consistent with the more transitory output drops seen after non-financial recessions, where such shocks may have been more important. The second chapter, based on work co-written with Corina Boar, considers the implications of financial market frictions for optimal linear capital taxation, in a setting where the government is concerned with redistribution. By including financial frictions, we emphasize the effect of a new channel affecting the equity-efficiency trade-off of redistribution: taxes affect the allocative efficiency of capital and, ultimately, total factor productivity. We find that high tax rates can be optimal, provided that they are applied to wealth, rather than risky capital. Under plausible parameter values, we find that the optimal tax on risky capital is lower than that on wealth, and roughly in line with current U.S. levels. This suggests welfare gains from taxing wealth at a higher rate than risky capital. The third chapter, based on work co-written with Corina Boar and Yicheng Wang, studies the effect of banking deregulation in the US on the distribution of income, from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. We focus on the effect of the removal of interstate banking and branching restrictions over the 1970-1994 period. We present a theoretical model based on Greenwood and Jovanovic (1990) to illustrate the channels through which this deregulation may affect the income distribution. In the model, income inequality rises after banking deregulation for some values of the parameters--because deregulation decreases the cost of borrowing, which primarily benefits wealthy firm-owners. We empirically estimate the effect of interstate banking and branching deregulation on income inequality by exploiting variations in the timing of deregulation across states. We find that the removal of banking restrictions increased the Gini coefficient by 6 percent in the long run."--Pages ix-xi.

Essays on Macroeconomics and Financial Stability

Essays on Macroeconomics and Financial Stability PDF Author: Pablo Garcia Sanchez
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The 2008 crisis and the ensuing Great Recession shook the consensus on how to run economic policy. They reminded us that financial imbalances could significantly derail economic activity. In addition, they showed that existing policy tools did not guarantee macro-financial stability; thereby leading to a rethink of monetary policy and financial regulation. Such a reevaluation has prompted a call for macroprudential tools, i.e., those tools intended for limiting systemic risk and ensuring the resilience of the financial sector. Besides, it has raised new questions about monetary policy and its effects on the risk taking behavior of economic agents - the so-called risk taking channel. A decade from the beginning of the crisis, the contours of a new policy framework for economic and financial stability are still very unclear. Knowledge on which regulatory instruments and how to employ them to curb the buildup of imbalances is limited. Neither is much known about the costs of those instruments.Regulatory intervention constraints some behaviors and distorts the allocation of resources. Consequently, the risk of imposing insidious costs on economic growth must not be underestimated. Likewise, very little is known about the relationship between monetary policy and the perception and pricing of risk by market participants. Nonetheless, it is natural to think that the monetary policy stance may affect the risk taking behavior of economic units, by influencing the attitudes towards risk and the assessment of risks. If so, failure by monetary authorities to consider this phenomenon could exacerbate boom bust patterns. The aim of this thesis is to explore the path towards macroeconomic and financial stability. I have basedmy work on the modern dynamic macroeconomic methods and techniques. Specifically, the first essay develops a canonical real business cycle model to assess the macroeconomic consequences of bank capital requirements, arguably the most used prudential tool. The second essay zooms in on the banking sector, and proposes a structural dynamic model with a large number of heterogeneous banks. The model is employed to study the effectiveness of interbank exposure limits. Having analyzed regulatory intervention, the last essay uses time series econometrics to shed some light on the risk taking channel of monetary policy. It is my firm belief that macroeconomics models for financial stability analysis should consider nonlinear patterns such as state dependence, asymmetries and amplification effects. Under unusual conditions like financial booms or credit crunches, economic agents behave differently than during normal times. In other words, the inner workings of the macroeconomy become essentially nonlinear under abnormal circumstances. Therefore, local behavior around the long run equilibrium of the economy is unlikely to contain relevant information about what may happen in exceptional events. In consequence, I study macroeconomic policy exclusively through the lens of nonlinear frameworks and techniques. Regarding the main results, this thesis makes a strong case in favor of macroprudential regulation. I provide clear evidence suggesting that regulatory intervention can be a powerful tool to strengthen financial resilience, reduce economic volatility and smooth business cycles. In addition, this thesis shows that accommodative monetary policy can produce overconfidence among market participants; thereby increasing risk taking and contributing to the buildup of imbalances. In other words, it provides empirical evidence for the existence of a risk taking channel of monetary policy.