Three Essays on the Role of Expectations in Business Cycles

Three Essays on the Role of Expectations in Business Cycles PDF Author: Rémi Vivès
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this thesis, I investigate the role of expectations in business cycles by studying three different kinds of expectations. First, I focus on a theoretical explanation of business cycles generated by changes in expectations which turn out to be self-fulfilling. This chapter improves a puzzle from the sunspot literature, thereby giving more evidence towards an interpretation of business cycles based on self-fulfilling prophecies. Second, I empirically analyze the propagation mechanisms of central bank announcements through changes in market participants' beliefs. This chapter shows that credible announcements about future unconventional monetary policies can be used as a coordination device in a sovereign debt crisis framework. Third, I study a broader concept of expectations and investigate the predictive power of political climate on the pricing of sovereign risk. This chapter shows that political climate provides additional predictive power beyond the traditional determinants of sovereign bond spreads. In order to interrogate the role of expectations in business cycles from multiple angles, I use a variety of methodologies in this thesis, including theoretical and empirical analyses, web scraping, machine learning, and textual analysis. In addition, this thesis uses innovative data from the social media platform Twitter. Regardless of my methodology, all my results convey the same message: expectations matter, both for economic research and economically sound policy-making.

Three Essays on the Role of Expectations in Business Cycles

Three Essays on the Role of Expectations in Business Cycles PDF Author: Rémi Vivès
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this thesis, I investigate the role of expectations in business cycles by studying three different kinds of expectations. First, I focus on a theoretical explanation of business cycles generated by changes in expectations which turn out to be self-fulfilling. This chapter improves a puzzle from the sunspot literature, thereby giving more evidence towards an interpretation of business cycles based on self-fulfilling prophecies. Second, I empirically analyze the propagation mechanisms of central bank announcements through changes in market participants' beliefs. This chapter shows that credible announcements about future unconventional monetary policies can be used as a coordination device in a sovereign debt crisis framework. Third, I study a broader concept of expectations and investigate the predictive power of political climate on the pricing of sovereign risk. This chapter shows that political climate provides additional predictive power beyond the traditional determinants of sovereign bond spreads. In order to interrogate the role of expectations in business cycles from multiple angles, I use a variety of methodologies in this thesis, including theoretical and empirical analyses, web scraping, machine learning, and textual analysis. In addition, this thesis uses innovative data from the social media platform Twitter. Regardless of my methodology, all my results convey the same message: expectations matter, both for economic research and economically sound policy-making.

Three Essays on Expectation Driven Business Cycles

Three Essays on Expectation Driven Business Cycles PDF Author: Shen Guo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This thesis studies business cycles driven by agents' expectation of future technology changes. The first chapter explores the effects which nominal rigidities and monetary policies have on the generation of Pigou cycles. The optimal response of the central bank is analyzed under circumstances when agents receive a signal indicating the technology change in the future. To achieve these objectives, I introduce nominal rigidities and monetary policy into a standard two-sector model with non-durable and durable goods. The optimal reaction of the central bank is found by solving the Ramsey optimization problem. I find that nominal rigidities tend to amplify the responses to the expectation and monetary policies affect the expectation driven business cycles by affecting the real interest rate and user cost of durable goods. Another interesting result is that a simple policy rule reacting to the inflation rates in both non-durable and durable sector with appropriate weights can closely mimic the performance of the Ramsey policy. The second chapter estimates a sticky price two-sector model with home production and capital adjustment costs to assess the significance of the news shocks in generating aggregate fluctuations. The analysis suggests that news shocks account for about 34% of the fluctuations in the aggregate output, 25% of the fluctuations in consumption-sector output and 38% of the fluctuations in investment-sector output. The third chapter explores the booms and busts induced by news shocks in a model economy with financial market frictions. With the presence of financial market frictions, firms have to pay an external finance premium which depends inversely on their net values. This provides firms with an incentive to build up capital stocks now to lower the external finance premium in the future. When firms receive news indicating a future technology improvement, they anticipate the need for more capital and so more external finance in the future; they could lower their future external finance costs by building up their capital and net values now. By adding financial market frictions into an otherwise standard RBC model, the model in chapter 3 succeeds in generating a boom when a news shock hits the economy.

Essays on Expectations-driven Business Cycles

Essays on Expectations-driven Business Cycles PDF Author: Oscar Pavlov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
This thesis addresses the role of imperfect competition in business cycles driven by expectations and beliefs about the future state of the economy. It consists of three self-contained papers. The first paper examines the roles of composition of aggregate demand and taste for variety in a real business cycle model with endogenous entries and exits of monopolistically competitive firms. It finds that taste for variety can alone make the economy susceptible to endogenous (sunspot driven) business cycles. Importantly, in light of recent research suggesting that aggregate markups in the U.S. are procyclical, sunspot equilibria emerge with procyclical markups that are within empirically plausible ranges. The second paper considers aggregate markup variations in business cycles driven by news about future total factor productivity. It shows that the addition of endogenous countercyclical markups and investment adjustment costs allows the standard one-sector real business cycle model to generate empirically supported expectations driven fluctuations. The simulated model reproduces the regular features of U.S. aggregate fluctuations. The third paper investigates the role of product variety effects and variable markups in expectations-driven business cycles. It demonstrates that taste for variety and investment adjustment costs allow the otherwise canonical real business cycle model to display quantitatively realistic fluctuations in response to news about future total factor productivity. Moreover, the interaction between price-cost decisions and firm entry and exit allows such business cycles to occur for empirically plausible levels of procyclical markups and variety effects.

Essays on Expectations-driven Business Cycles

Essays on Expectations-driven Business Cycles PDF Author: Anca-Ioana Sirbu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Three Essays on Productivity (RLE: Business Cycles)

Three Essays on Productivity (RLE: Business Cycles) PDF Author: Mark J. Lasky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317502523
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The behaviour of US productivity since this book was originally publishedin 1994, has added new relevance to the relationship between profits and productivity. In the long run, productivity growth determines the economic standard of living. This book is divided into three parts: the basis of the first is the empirical finding that, controlling for normal business cycle effects, productivity grows faster when profits have been low than otherwise. The second part discusses how to measure marginal cost using time series data and the third tests a basic assumption that productivity growth is exogenous to labour and capital.

Three Essays in Business Cycles and Finance

Three Essays in Business Cycles and Finance PDF Author: Gabriel Perez-Quiros
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Capital movements
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Essays in Expectation Driven Business Cycle and Wage Polarization

Essays in Expectation Driven Business Cycle and Wage Polarization PDF Author: Quazi Fidia Farah
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation investigates two essential features of the US economy. First, it explores how news about future productivity changes business cycle fluctuations. Using the a representative agent model, it shows that implementation labor in workplace organization could be an important channel through which news about the fundamentals can realistically generate US business cycle fluctuations. Further this idea is extended using the perspective of sunspot fluctuations. In particular, the model can lead to multiple equilibria under specific parameterizations. Second, a general equilibrium model has been developed with heterogeneous agents to explain the wage polarization feature of the US labor market, particularly how the price of an important technology is connected to lifetime earnings of agents and affects their college decisions. The following summarizes the three chapters of my dissertation. The first chapter which I co-authored with Dr. Blankenau, argues that purchasing investment goods does not directly increase the productive capacity of a business. Changes in the business through the installation of capital, worker training, and workplace reorganization are often required. These changes themselves are not easily automated. Change requires workers. We build a model where investment requires a complementary labor input. This mechanism is embedded in a representative agent model with capacity utilization, adjustment costs, and separable preferences. We show that this environment can yield positive co-movement between consumption, investment, and labor hours when the economy experiences a news shock about future productivity, thus providing an additional channel through which news shocks can generate key business cycle features. The second chapter is an extension of the first chapter. I investigate the indeterminacy in a representative agent model with implementation labor and increasing returns in production. First, my analysis shows that a representative agent with implementation labor can exhibit increasing returns to scale. Then I show that self-fulfilling beliefs of agents lead to business cycle fluctuations in which multiple equilibria can arise under specific parameterizations. Specifically, implementation labor in the production of capital is the highly important, necessary condition for the self-fulling equilibrium outcome. The third chapter, which is also a joint work with Dr. Blankenau, discusses the wage polarization feature of the US labor market. We build a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents, showing how wage polarization can emerge when the price of computer capital falls. Consequently, we find the share of the population with a college degree decreases. Our findings are consistent with recent empirical data that show a U-shaped wage growth pattern in the US as well as a slower growth rate of college-educated workers despite the high returns of investing in education. In the model, we assume that each agent is born with a portfolio of skills. Specifically, each agent can provide manual labor, routine labor, and abstract labor and must decide how much of each to provide. An agent can increase efficiency in all types of labor by attending college. All three types of labor are valued in the labor market at an endogenously determined wage rate. Computer capital is a substitute for routine labor. As its price falls and its quantity increases, agents with a relative aptitude for routine labor no longer find it advantageous to attend college. Since routinization of tasks harms middle-income agents, the model has government policy implications for observed wage polarization.

The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions

The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions PDF Author: Martin Shubik
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262693110
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
This first volume in a three-volume exposition of Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics" explores a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. This is the first volume in a three-volume exposition of Martin Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics"--a term he coined in 1959 to describe the theoretical underpinnings needed for the construction of an economic dynamics. The goal is to develop a process-oriented theory of money and financial institutions that reconciles micro- and macroeconomics, using as a prime tool the theory of games in strategic and extensive form. The approach involves a search for minimal financial institutions that appear as a logical, technological, and institutional necessity, as part of the "rules of the game." Money and financial institutions are assumed to be the basic elements of the network that transmits the sociopolitical imperatives to the economy. Volume 1 deals with a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. Volume 2 explores the new economic features that arise when we consider multi-period finite and infinite horizon economies. Volume 3 will consider the specific role of financial institutions and government, and formulate the economic financial control problem linking micro- and macroeconomics.

Three Essays on Business Cycles

Three Essays on Business Cycles PDF Author: John Bailey Jones
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Three Essays on the Us Business Cycle, Expectations Formation and Model Comparison

Three Essays on the Us Business Cycle, Expectations Formation and Model Comparison PDF Author: Angelia Lee Grant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This thesis contributes to the vast literature on understanding the disturbances that cause recessions, testing the importance of the assumption of rational expectations in macroeconomic models, and assessing model selection criteria. The main objective is to assess structural instabilities in macroeconomic models and to develop a new econometric methodology to compare different assumptions regarding expectations formation. Chapter 2 examines the role of oil price, demand, supply and monetary policy shocks during the 2001 US slowdown and Great Recession. It replicates the structural vector autoregression (VAR) of Peersman (2005) and extends it with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility. Significant time variation is found in some impulse responses, with evidence that the constant coefficients VAR is erroneously representing structural instabilities as shocks. All models find that a combination of shocks caused the 2001 slowdown and Great Recession, but the role of individual shocks differs across models. Chapter 3 assesses the assumption of rational expectations versus adaptive learning in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model for the US economy. Using the framework in Smets and Wouters (2007) and Slobodyan and Wouters (2012), it finds that expectations implied by the rational expectations model are comparable to the adaptive learning models for actual and survey data on consumption and inflation. This chapter also formally assesses the overall fit of the model with different assumptions regarding expectations formation using the deviance information criterion (DIC), which is not commonly used to compare DSGE models. It finds that the rational expectations model is comparable to the adaptive learning models according to this criterion. Chapter 4 proposes fast algorithms for computing the DIC based on the integrated likelihood for a variety of high-dimensional latent variable models. The DIC has been a widely used Bayesian model comparison criterion since Spiegelhalter et al. (2002) introduced the concept and Celeux et al. (2006) introduced a number of alternative definitions for latent variable models. However, recent studies have cautioned against the use of some of these variants. While the DIC computed using the integrated likelihood seems to perform well, it is rarely used in practice due to computational burden. This chapter shows that the DICs based on the integrated likelihoods have much smaller numerical standard errors compared to the other DICs.