Three Essays on Economics and Information Shocks

Three Essays on Economics and Information Shocks PDF Author: Kyle I. Carlson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
A person living in an industrialized society has almost no choice but to receive information daily with negative implications for himself or others. His attention will often be drawn to the ups and downs of economic indicators or the alleged misdeeds of leaders and organizations. Reacting to new information is central to economics, but economics typically ignores the affective aspect of the response, for example, of stress or anger. These essays present the results of considering how the affective aspect of the response can influence economic outcomes. The first chapter presents an experiment in which individuals were presented with information about various non-profit organizations and allowed to take actions that rewarded or punished those organizations. When social interaction was introduced into this environment an asymmetry between rewarding and punishing appeared. The net effects of punishment became greater and more variable, whereas the effects of reward were unchanged. The individuals were more strongly influenced by negative social information and used that information to target unpopular organizations. These behaviors contributed to an increase in inequality among the outcomes of the organizations. The second and third chapters present empirical studies of reactions to negative information about local economic conditions. Economic factors are among the most prevalent stressors, and stress is known to have numerous negative effects on health. These chapters document localized, transient effects of the announcement of information about large-scale job losses. News of mass layoffs and shut downs of large military bases are found to decrease birth weights and gestational ages among babies born in the affected regions. The effect magnitudes are close to those estimated in similar studies of disasters.

Three Essays on Economics and Information Shocks

Three Essays on Economics and Information Shocks PDF Author: Kyle I. Carlson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Get Book Here

Book Description
A person living in an industrialized society has almost no choice but to receive information daily with negative implications for himself or others. His attention will often be drawn to the ups and downs of economic indicators or the alleged misdeeds of leaders and organizations. Reacting to new information is central to economics, but economics typically ignores the affective aspect of the response, for example, of stress or anger. These essays present the results of considering how the affective aspect of the response can influence economic outcomes. The first chapter presents an experiment in which individuals were presented with information about various non-profit organizations and allowed to take actions that rewarded or punished those organizations. When social interaction was introduced into this environment an asymmetry between rewarding and punishing appeared. The net effects of punishment became greater and more variable, whereas the effects of reward were unchanged. The individuals were more strongly influenced by negative social information and used that information to target unpopular organizations. These behaviors contributed to an increase in inequality among the outcomes of the organizations. The second and third chapters present empirical studies of reactions to negative information about local economic conditions. Economic factors are among the most prevalent stressors, and stress is known to have numerous negative effects on health. These chapters document localized, transient effects of the announcement of information about large-scale job losses. News of mass layoffs and shut downs of large military bases are found to decrease birth weights and gestational ages among babies born in the affected regions. The effect magnitudes are close to those estimated in similar studies of disasters.

Three Essays on Economics and Information Shocks

Three Essays on Economics and Information Shocks PDF Author: Kyle I. Carlson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A person living in an industrialized society has almost no choice but to receive information daily with negative implications for himself or others. His attention will often be drawn to the ups and downs of economic indicators or the alleged misdeeds of leaders and organizations. Reacting to new information is central to economics, but economics typically ignores the affective aspect of the response, for example, of stress or anger. These essays present the results of considering how the affective aspect of the response can influence economic outcomes. The first chapter presents an experiment in which individuals were presented with information about various non-profit organizations and allowed to take actions that rewarded or punished those organizations. When social interaction was introduced into this environment an asymmetry between rewarding and punishing appeared. The net effects of punishment became greater and more variable, whereas the effects of reward were unchanged. The individuals were more strongly influenced by negative social information and used that information to target unpopular organizations. These behaviors contributed to an increase in inequality among the outcomes of the organizations. The second and third chapters present empirical studies of reactions to negative information about local economic conditions. Economic factors are among the most prevalent stressors, and stress is known to have numerous negative effects on health. These chapters document localized, transient effects of the announcement of information about large-scale job losses. News of mass layoffs and shut downs of large military bases are found to decrease birth weights and gestational ages among babies born in the affected regions. The effect magnitudes are close to those estimated in similar studies of disasters.

Three Essays on the Propagation of Monetary Shocks in Open Economies

Three Essays on the Propagation of Monetary Shocks in Open Economies PDF Author: Søren Vester Sørensen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description


Three Essays in Monetary and Financial Economics

Three Essays in Monetary and Financial Economics PDF Author: Liang Ma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of monetary and financial economics. Specifically, we use high-frequency financial data to study monetary policies with a focus on the information effect, namely, that some of the interest rate movements around central bank announcements are not policy-driven, but are results of the market becoming aware of the central bank's view about future economic prospects. Understanding the role played by the information effect will help us apprehend monetary policy implications in both normal times and extraordinary situations. Chapter 1 evaluates the impact of unconventional monetary policy in the newly developed instrumental variable structural Vector Autoregression (VAR) framework. In the current low interest rate environment, central banks must resort to using unconventional monetary policies, such as forward guidance and quantitative easing, to flight recessions. To empirically evaluate the effectiveness of these unconventional policies, we need to rely on the clean policy shock. A prominent concern is that the often used high-frequency interest rate surprises not only reflect unexpected policy changes, but also contain the information effect. We contribute to the literature by using a heteroskedasticity identification approach, taking advantage of changes in the relative dominance of economic shocks around different macroeconomic announcements. Analysis based on clean policy shocks suggests that the unconventional policies successfully aided the recovery in the U.S. More importantly, we show that the information effect, while it may introduce bias, is rather modest when it comes to estimating the real impact of unconventional monetary policies. Chapter 2 studies the stock return pattern after the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcement. This research is motivated by recent literature that documents stock returns drifts, both before and after FOMC announcements, according to policy rate surprises. Indeed, research has shown that the information contained in the central bank announcement is multifaceted: its current monetary policy stances (monetary policy news) and news about future economic prospects (non-monetary policy news). Our contribution is to combine these two strands of literature. To the best of our knowledge, no study has looked at stock market reactions to the non-monetary news stemming from policy announcements. We identify both good and bad news events using a combination of sign restriction with high-frequency financial prices. The novel finding is that following bad FOMC announcements, that is the market interpreted the Fed announcements as revealing negative information about the economy, we observe significant positive stock returns in a 20-day period. We call this the ``post-FOMC drift.'' Further analysis suggests that the drift is likely caused by relatively heightened risks associated with bad announcements, although the drift is consistent with market overreactions as well. Moreover, the post FOMC drift is a market-wide phenomenon and can be exploited in an easy-to-implement trading strategy with a historical record of earning 40\% of the annual equity premium. In Chapter 3, we explore the channels through which the FOMC announcements affect the financial market. While much of the existing literature measures the surprise components with only changes in policy rates (surrounding the announcement), we contribute to the existing literature by taking a broader view through examining unexpected changes in longer-term yields, corporate credit spreads, and inflation expectations (a proxy for growth prospects), using high-frequency financial data. Through a regression analysis, our findings show that these additional surprises provide orthogonal information and sharply increase the goodness of fit in explaining stock returns around FOMC announcements, with the inclusion of inflation expectations having the biggest contribution. The important role of inflation expectation suggests that the current literature, which uses stock prices together with nominal rates to disentangle the information contents of central bank announcements, may be too limited in the scope of information it uses.

Three Essays on the Propagtion of Monetary Shocks in Open Economies

Three Essays on the Propagtion of Monetary Shocks in Open Economies PDF Author: Søren Vester Sørensen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Three Essays on the Relation Between Sectoral Shocks and Aggregate Demand

Three Essays on the Relation Between Sectoral Shocks and Aggregate Demand PDF Author: Koen Vermeylen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Three Essays on Uncertainty and Learning by Economic Agents

Three Essays on Uncertainty and Learning by Economic Agents PDF Author: Hilde Patron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Federal Reserve banks
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Three Essays on the Implications of Limited Attention in Economics

Three Essays on the Implications of Limited Attention in Economics PDF Author: Jérémy Boccanfuso
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation is a collection of three essays on the economic implications of limited attention. It is supplemented with a general introduction (Chapter 1).The first chapter introduces an ongoing paradigm shift in the macroeconomic literature from full-information rational expectations to rationally inattentive economic agents. It then presents some characteristics of this new class of models and current challenges in the literature that motivates the work in this dissertation.The second chapter is a contribution to consumption theory. It studies the consumption-saving problem of a consumer who faces a fixed cost for paying attention to noisy information and whose attention strategy, i.e., whether or not she pays attention, can be a function of the underlying information. At the optimum, consumers chose to be at- tentive when evidence accumulates far from their prior beliefs. The model provides an explanation for four puzzling empirical findings on consumption and expectations. First, consumers' attention depends on the information content. Second, aggregate information rigidities vary over the business cycle. Third, consumers only react to large anticipated shocks and neglect the impact of small ones. Fourth, aggregate consumption dynamics vary over the business cycle. The third chapter is a theoretical contribution to the literature in behavioral public economics. It studies how information frictions in agents' tax perceptions affect the design of actual tax policy. Developing a positive theory of tax policy, it shows that agents' inattention interacts with policymaking and induces the government to implementinefficiently high tax rates. It then quantifies the magnitude of this policy distortion for the US economy. Overall, the findings suggest that existing information frictions - and thereby tax complexity - lead to undesirable, large and regressive tax increases.The fourth chapter is an empirical contribution to the macroeconomic literature on information frictions. Using the ECB survey of professional forecasters, it estimates a two margin forecast formation process that allows for forecast rounding on individual and consensus forecast data. Forecasters decide when to revise their forecast (extensive margin). When they do, they slowly incorporate new information (intensive margin) and may report a rounded value for their new forecast (rounding). It finds that these three rigidities simultaneously exist and estimate their respective contribution. The overall forecast stickiness is almost exclusively the consequence of the rigidities at the intensive margin. It then derives quarterly time series for the evolution of information frictions and proposes a simple mapping to account for these variations in economic models.

Three Essays in International Economics

Three Essays in International Economics PDF Author: Alan Glen Isaac
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Three Essays on Economic Fluctuations

Three Essays on Economic Fluctuations PDF Author: Stephane Dupraz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Because distinguishing models is harder in a noisier economy, the model is one of endogenous ambiguity. Because one agent's noise is another's private information, one agent's reliance on his private information increases how much ambiguity his neighbor faces. I revisit the role of private and public information in this new light. On the positive side, I show that the equilibrium depends less on fundamentals as agents become more ambiguity averse, and not at all in the limit where they become infinitely so. I also show that, because it makes agents trust their model more, the release of public information drives the economy toward fundamentals whenever ambiguity-aversion is high enough, in contrast to the standard result under rational expectations. On the normative side, I show that the equilibrium features too much dependence on fundamentals: agents would rather live in a world that they understand better, even if it means living in a world that is less responsive to changes in fundamentals.