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Author: Jeffrey A. Levy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Macroeconomics
Languages : en
Pages : 90
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In this dissertation I examine economic uncertainty, particularly from the perspective of disaggregation below the national level. In part one I outline the building of news-based uncertainty measures for all 50 US states plus Washington DC. I analyze different search specifications, finding that the simplest set of terms involving one group for "economy" and one group for "uncertainty" has the highest resolution, while yielding similar results to more focused news searches, including one similar to the ubiquitous policy search from Baker et al. (2016), and an alternative specification designed to eliminate false positives. I also explore the differences between two other national uncertainty measures - the VIX stock market volatility index from the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and the unforecastable macroeconomic factors from Jurado et al. (2015). In part two, I build upon the analysis of the state uncertainty measures begun in part one. I show that analyzing uncertainty at the national level obscures significant state-level variation, with state-to-national uncertainty correlations ranging from 0.124 to 0.913, while some inter-state uncertainty correlations even turn negative. I then show that VAR analysis using state-level unemployment figures yields impulse response functions that are remarkably similar to existing national-level uncertainty research, with 92% of states exhibiting a rise in unemployment that peaks near 12 months after an uncertainty shock, then overshoots the starting point for a time. Finally, in part three I attempt to get at the causal effects of an uncertainty shock, as VAR analysis is unable to do, by applying a difference-in-difference framework to the natural experiment of military base closures. I look at the 1991, 1993, 1995, and 2005 rounds of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, whereby the government moves military jobs in and out of bases through a process that is, at least initially, heavily insulated from confounding economic indicators and political influence. This creates asymmetric and exogenous uncertainty shocks in places with different military employment, which I use to show that a one-percentage point higher military share of employment causes a tenth of a percentage point higher unemployment rate in a given Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) during a BRAC round.
Author: Jeffrey A. Levy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Macroeconomics
Languages : en
Pages : 90
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Book Description
In this dissertation I examine economic uncertainty, particularly from the perspective of disaggregation below the national level. In part one I outline the building of news-based uncertainty measures for all 50 US states plus Washington DC. I analyze different search specifications, finding that the simplest set of terms involving one group for "economy" and one group for "uncertainty" has the highest resolution, while yielding similar results to more focused news searches, including one similar to the ubiquitous policy search from Baker et al. (2016), and an alternative specification designed to eliminate false positives. I also explore the differences between two other national uncertainty measures - the VIX stock market volatility index from the Chicago Board Options Exchange, and the unforecastable macroeconomic factors from Jurado et al. (2015). In part two, I build upon the analysis of the state uncertainty measures begun in part one. I show that analyzing uncertainty at the national level obscures significant state-level variation, with state-to-national uncertainty correlations ranging from 0.124 to 0.913, while some inter-state uncertainty correlations even turn negative. I then show that VAR analysis using state-level unemployment figures yields impulse response functions that are remarkably similar to existing national-level uncertainty research, with 92% of states exhibiting a rise in unemployment that peaks near 12 months after an uncertainty shock, then overshoots the starting point for a time. Finally, in part three I attempt to get at the causal effects of an uncertainty shock, as VAR analysis is unable to do, by applying a difference-in-difference framework to the natural experiment of military base closures. I look at the 1991, 1993, 1995, and 2005 rounds of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, whereby the government moves military jobs in and out of bases through a process that is, at least initially, heavily insulated from confounding economic indicators and political influence. This creates asymmetric and exogenous uncertainty shocks in places with different military employment, which I use to show that a one-percentage point higher military share of employment causes a tenth of a percentage point higher unemployment rate in a given Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) during a BRAC round.
Author: Mallory Yeromonahos
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Sheri M. Markrose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 406
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Author: Antonio Fatás
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Equilibrium (Economics)
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Author: Jorge Mario Uribe Gil
Publisher: Ed. Universidad de Cantabria
ISBN: 8417888756
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
This book adds to the resolution of two problems in finance and economics: i) what is macro-financial uncertainty? : How to measure it? How is it different from risk? How important is it for the financial markets? And ii) what sort of asymmetries underlie financial risk and uncertainty propagation across the global financial markets? That is, how risk and uncertainty change according to factors such as market states or market participants. In Chapter 2, which is entitled “Momentum Uncertainties”, the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and the abnormal returns of a momentum trading strategy in the stock market is studies. We show that high levels of uncertainty in the economy impact negatively and significantly the returns of a portfolio of stocks that consist of buying past winners and selling past losers. High uncertainty reduces below zero the abnormal returns of momentum, extinguishes the Sharpe ratio of the momentum strategy, while increases the probability of momentum crashes both by increasing the skewness and the kurtosis of the momentum return distribution. Uncertainty acts as an economic regime that underlies abrupt changes over time of the returns generated by momentum strategies. In Chapter 3, “Measuring Uncertainty in the Stock Market”, a new index for measuring stock market uncertainty on a daily basis is proposed. The index considers the inherent differentiation between uncertainty and the common variations between the series. The second contribution of chapter 3 is to show how this financial uncertainty index can also serve as an indicator of macroeconomic uncertainty. Finally, the dynamic relationship between uncertainty and the series of consumption, interest rates, production and stock market prices, among others, is analized. In chapter 4: “Uncertainty, Systemic Shocks and the Global Banking Sector: Has the Crisis Modified their Relationship?” we explore the stability of systemic risk and uncertainty propagation among financial institutions in the global economy, and show that it has remained stable over the last decade. Additionally, a new simple tool for measuring the resilience of financial institutions to these systemic shocks is provided. We examine the characteristics and stability of systemic risk and uncertainty, in relation to the dynamics of the banking sector stock returns. This sort of evidence is supportive of past claims, made in the field of macroeconomics, which hold that during the global financial crisis the financial system may have faced stronger versions of traditional shocks rather than a new type of shock. In chapter 5, “Currency downside risk, liquidity, and financial stability”, downside risk propagation across global currency markets and the ways in which it is related to liquidity is analyzed. Two primary contributions to the literature follow. First, tail-spillovers between currencies in the global FX market are estimated. This index is easy to build and does not require intraday data, which constitutes an important advantage. Second, we show that turnover is related to risk spillovers in global currency markets. Chapter 6 is entitled “Spillovers from the United States to Latin American and G7 Stock Markets: A VAR-Quantile Analysis”. This chapter contributes to the studies of contagion, market integration and cross-border spillovers during both regular and crisis episodes by carrying out a multivariate quantile analysis. It focuses on Latin American stock markets, which have been characterized by a highly positive dynamic in recent decades, in terms of market capitalization and liquidity ratios, after a far-reaching process of market liberalization and reforms to pension funds across the continent during the 80s and 90s. We document smaller dependences between the LA markets and the US market than those between the US and the developed economies, especially in the highest and lowest quantiles.
Author: Julian Felix Ludwig
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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This dissertation examines how expectations are formed and how they interact with economic activities. Beliefs about economic outcomes vary with timing and accuracy of information, which have important implications for macroeconomic dynamics. The importance of expectations has long been emphasized in rational expectations (RE) models (see e.g. Lucas 1972, 1976; Kydland and Prescott 1982), and diffusion of information has been modeled in many ways (see e.g. Beaudry and Portier 2004, 2006; Mankiw and Reis 2002; Woodford 2003; Sims 2003). My work builds on this literature and aims to improve the understanding of information structure, formation of beliefs, and decision-making, and how they contribute to macro business cycles. In the first chapter, I point out how identification of full information rational expectations (FIRE) models suffers from Manski's (1993) reflection problem. I extend the standard rational expectations (RE) model to allow for a more general information structure and introduce a new framework to identify the generalized model with forecaster data. Identification is no longer subject to the reflection problem when two changes are made to the information structure: the addition of news shocks and imperfect information. News shocks provide additional variation in expectations about the future. Imperfect information provides changes in beliefs about past states, through which the feedback between expectations and decisions goes only in one direction. Expectations data are consistent with both. An application to Greenbook forecasts illustrates the importance of both news shocks and learning about the past. When I apply this framework to a Blanchard and Quah (1989) decomposition, I reach qualitatively new results. For example, expansionary supply shocks decrease unemployment. Supply shocks are also particularly subject to both news and information rigidities, so relaxing the information structure is key to correctly identifying these shocks. In the second chapter, I discover how both good and bad news shocks coincide with higher uncertainty on impact. This new stylized fact is robust to different empirical models of the news shocks literature and different proxies for U.S. macro uncertainty. The new stylized fact has implications in three fields. First, bad news shocks produce the dynamics discovered in the uncertainty literature: spikes in uncertainty are followed by drops in output. I show that there is indeed some overlap between bad news and uncertainty shocks, as the effect of an uncertainty shock gets weaker when controlling for bad news shocks. Second, I show that the close relationship between news shocks and uncertainty seems to be also responsible for the close relationship between quarterly stock returns and stock market volatility - a proxy for uncertainty. This contributes to the finance literature that works on this relationship. Third, introducing a non-linear empirical model, I find additional asymmetries in the responses to news shocks due to the asymmetric response of uncertainty. This contributes directly to the news shocks literature. An important conclusion of chapters one and two is that economic shocks vary with availability of information. The third chapter deals with such heterogeneity. I relax the assumption that economic shocks of the same type are homogeneous, respectively, always have the same effect. Instead, I argue that economists identify a shock that consists of a variety of heterogeneous components. For example, a technology shock is the sum of all disaggregate technology shocks, from innovations in marketing up to inventions in the manufacturing process, which all have different effects on the economy. I discuss how standard identification methods can identify the shocks of interest despite this heterogeneity. I find that the weights on the shock components depend on the identification strategy so that different identification strategies produce different effects. This could explain why different macro papers often identify different responses to the same shock, in the same country, and over the same time period
Author: Zidong An
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781085582506
Category : Economic forecasting
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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This dissertation consists of three essays on expectation formation process.The first chapter estimates information stickiness using the common component of professional forecasters' inattention to many economic variables. Information stickiness is hard to measure, but important for monetary policy effectiveness. Professional forecasters in the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters and cross-country Consensus Forecasts on average update information every three to four months. More importantly, forecaster inattention is state-dependent, and it is driven by both economic fundamentals and market volatility. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with inattentive firms, this chapter characterizes the relationship between inattention and monetary policy effectiveness. Using empirical analyses, this paper confirms that monetary policy is more effective when firms are inattentive. The second chapter discusses the assumption of sticky information model and derives two novel model implications. Both ex-ante forecast disagreement and ex-post forecast accuracy are associated with the level of inattention at individual level. Between ex-ante forecast disagreement and inattention, there is a U-shaped relationship. When an individual forecaster updates information much more or much less frequently relative to the average level, she tends to have larger disagreement. Between ex-post forecast accuracy and inattention, there is a strictly negative relationship. A forecaster who tends to update her forecast more frequently is expected to have more accurate forecast. Using micro-level data, this chapter finds that forecasters are not interchangeable in terms of their forecast disagreement, forecast accuracy, and inattention. Furthermore, their empirical relationships confirm the model implications. This chapter provides an assessment of the IMF's unemployment forecasts, which have not received much scrutiny to date. The focus is on the internal consistency of the IMF's growth and unemployment forecasts, and specifically on seeing whether the relationship between the two is consistent with the relationship in the data, i.e., with Okun's Law. We find that the average performance is good, in the sense that the relationship between growth and unemployment forecasts is fairly comparable to that which prevails in the data: on average, the Okun coefficient in the forecasts mirrors the Okun coefficient in the data. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement, particularly in the year-ahead forecasts and for the group of middle-income countries. We show that a linear combination of Okun-based unemployment forecasts and WEO unemployment forecasts can deliver significant gains in forecast accuracy for developing economies.
Author: Benjamin Barfod Lidofsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Macroeconomics
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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In these essays, I study macroeconomic responses to large recessions, in environments with heterogeneous agents. In the first chapter, "Long-Term Debt, Default Risk, and Policy Transmission during Severe Recessions", I study the implications of rollover risk on firm-level investment and aggregate dynamics. A growing empirical literature suggests that the maturity risk associated with long-term debt reduces firm-level investment, particularly during recessions. I introduce discretely maturing long-term debt into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model where heterogeneous firms borrow subject to default risk. My model is distinguished relative to existing long-term debt models in that it captures the rollover risk arising from uncertainty about what economic conditions will be when debt matures. Moreover, my firms actively save in a short-term financial asset to help hedge against the maturity risk associated with their debt. Nonetheless, the rollover risk associated with discretely maturing long-term debt exacerbates the debt overhang problem arising in conventional long-term debt models. Thus, firms effectively face greater financial frictions, and output is on average lower. Consequently, my model predicts a larger rise in defaults and a greater decline in endogenous aggregate productivity in its response to a financial shock. Thus, its financial recessions are both deeper and longer-lived than in conventional models. I also consider a large non-financial aggregate shock, and use my model to study the efficacy of targeted stimulus policies implemented over the U.S. 2020 recession. My findings suggest that the combined effects of the Paycheck Protection Program and the expansion of quantitative easing helped stem the rise in defaults and stimulate the subsequent economic recovery. The second chapter, "The Persistence of Recessions with Incomplete Markets and Time-Varying Risk" (joint with Aubhik Khan), studies the implications of precautionary savings behavior across households on aggregate responses to crises. We study the propagation of recessions in overlapping generations economies wherein households, with uncertain lifetimes and uninsurable earnings risk, face cyclical employment risk. Business cycles are driven by persistent shocks to TFP growth and household-level employment. Increases in employment risk cause fluctuations in both the unemployment rate and in labor force participation. In this setting, we introduce elements commonly used to deliver a strong and countercyclical precautionary savings motive. Specifically, households have non-separable utility characterized by high levels of risk aversion, and a diminishing marginal productivity of investment leads to a time-varying price of capital. We find that changes in precautionary savings, following aggregate shocks, have important implications for aggregate consumption. Persistent negative shocks to TFP growth, associated with increases in risk to employment, drive large declines in consumption. This helps explain the large fall in consumption observed over the Great Recession. An empirically consistent, moderate shock to TFP growth rates implies a large and persistent fall, against trend, in aggregate consumption. Moreover, an estimated rise in households' risk of long-term non-employment reduces labor force participation and reconciles the swift recovery in TFP growth rates with a protracted decline in consumption and output.
Author: Fredj Jawadi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319987143
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Written in honor of Emeritus Professor Georges Prat (University of Paris Nanterre, France), this book includes contributions from eminent authors on a range of topics that are of interest to researchers and graduates, as well as investors and portfolio managers. The topics discussed include the effects of information and transaction costs on informational and allocative market efficiency, bubbles and stock price dynamics, paradox of rational expectations and the principle of limited information, uncertainty and expectation hypotheses, oil price dynamics, and nonlinearity in asset price dynamics.
Author: Sheri M. Markose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 140
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Book Description
