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Author: Jan Sun
Publisher:
ISBN:
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Jan Sun
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Seth Neumuller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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These essays contribute to the study of labor economics and consumer finance, and fall within the broader category of quantitative macroeconomics. Chapter 1 investigates the trade-off between wage volatility (risk) and wage differentials (return) across industries through the lens of a general equilibrium, incomplete markets, life cycle model which allows for inter-industry mobility. While standard economic reasoning tells us that risk averse workers will demand a premium for exposure to wage volatility, for plausible calibrations of the model, I find that precisely the opposite is true - industries which expose workers to relatively low (high) wage volatility pay relatively high (low) wages. This chapter argues that inter-industry mobility is a quantitatively important insurance channel against labor market risk which is responsible for this counter-intuitive result. Chapters 2 and 3, which are both co-authored by Matthew Nelson Luzzetti, address issues in consumer finance. In Chapter 2, we introduce statistical learning and aggregate uncertainty into an otherwise standard model of consumer default. We show that learning by households and creditors endogenously generates a credit boom during a prolonged economic expansion like the Great Moderation and a severe and protracted credit crunch in response to an economic contraction like the recent financial crisis. This chapter illustrates that learning by households and creditors is an important driver of aggregate debt dynamics. Chapter 3 develops an equilibrium model of consumer default with both long-term collateralized mortgages and short-term unsecured debt. We use this framework to evaluate whether the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 contributed to the severity of the housing crisis by inducing homeowners to default on their mortgage who would otherwise have declared bankruptcy and remained in their home. We find that although this reform significantly increased mortgage default rates upon implementation, it likely had only a minor impact on the severity of the subsequent housing crash if lenders rationally adjusted their mortgage interest rates to account for its impact on the incentives of households to repay their debt.
Author: David Henry Bowman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Author: William C. Brainard
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262023252
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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These original contributions celebrate and extend Tobin's contributions to macroeconomics, international economics, finance, and economic policy.
Author: Manisha Padi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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This thesis consists of three chapters on consumer financial contracts. Particularly, this thesis focuses on the regulation and design of markets for financial contracts, and their impact on household financial health. The first chapter studies the role of consumer protection law in the function of mortgage markets in the United States. Consumer protection laws are intended to improve consumer outcomes and are becoming more common, particularly in mortgage markets after the 2008 recession. Little empirical evidence exists about the benefits of these laws to consumer outcomes, relative to the potential compliance costs. This chapter studies the effect of two common types of consumer protection laws: seller standards of conduct, enforced through ex post lawsuits by prosecutors and consumers, and mandated disclosures, which require sellers to provide consumers with information to help them make better decisions. Using a natural experiment in Ohio, which introduced the Homebuyer's Protection Act in 2007, 1 study the impact of both seller standards of conduct and mandated disclosures on the performance of loans owned by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac between 2002 and 2012. I find that imposing standards of conduct on lenders increases borrower defaults in the short term, and is correlated with a drop in foreclosures and fewer mortgage originations. Mandated disclosures decrease mortgage defaults in the short term, and the effect is correlated with smaller transactions, lower interest rates, and higher borrower credit scores. I introduce a simple model of strategic default showing that standards of conduct targeting lenders can provide incentives to lenders to be lenient towards all borrowers, increase borrower default, while mandated disclosure can induce behaviorally biased consumers to default less often. Taken together, the evidence suggests that seller standards of conduct result in lender lenience towards borrowers but operate by shifting the cost of dropping house prices from borrowers onto lenders. On the other hand, carefully designed disclosures can encourage consumers to be more responsible in repayment of loans and can decrease the overall impact of unexpected drops in house prices. The second chapter studies the impact of defined benefit pensions on retirees' consumption patterns. It is authored jointly with Professor Jerry Hausman. Retirees discontinuously decrease their consumption spending upon retirement, a phenomenon described as the retirement consumption puzzle. This chapter studies the impact of defined benefit pensions on the retirement consumption puzzle. Data from the Health and Retirement Survey shows that households with defined benefit pensions experience a significantly smaller drop in consumption spending at retirement. The difference in consumption patterns between households with defined benefit and defined contribution pensions is consistent with a drop in price of home production after retirement. Defined benefit pensions allow households to exert less effort in home production, as well as decreasing the need for precautionary savings, meaning their value is understated if home production is not accounted for. Using HRS data, we estimate the utility value of defined benefit pensions, incorporating both home production and precautionary savings. The results imply that current methods of valuing retirement income products, such as employer provided pensions and private annuities, are biased downward. The third chapter studies the purchase of annuities by retirees in Chile's privatized social security system. It is authored jointly with Gaston Illanes, of Northwestern University Department of Economics. Chile has one of the highest voluntary annuitization rates in the world, with more than 60% of retirees purchasing a private annuity. In contrast, less than 5% of US retirees purchase annuities, despite theoretical predictions that annuity value is high. Annuities in Chile are sold through a unique government-run exchange which decrease search costs and intensifies competition without imposing costs on firms. Chile also has a privatized social security system in which retirees that do not buy an annuity must take a "programmed withdrawal" of their mandated retirement savings that exposes them to more stock market risk than Social Security would. Using novel individual level administrative data and theoretical calibrations, we provide evidence that the high annuitization rate is driven by Chile's unique regulatory regime, rather than by the risk of programmed withdrawal in a privatized system. We document several features of the annuity exchange in Chile. First, annuity prices are low compared to the worldwide average. Second, annuity providers have significant market power. Third, selection exists in the market, both into purchase of annuities, and into searching for better prices. Based on these facts, we calibrate a insurance value of full annuitization compared to the privatized alternative offered by the Chilean government and compare to the value of full annuitization compared to public Social Security, such as that found in the US. The calibration suggests that privatization of social security alone cannot explain the high level of annuitization in Chile. Regulations limiting search costs can cause low prices, lower levels of adverse selection, and high brand preferences that together can explain the high annuitization rate.
Author: Philip Arestis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349219355
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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In these twelve essays, spanning fifteen years, Victoria Chick develops a distinctive view of macroeconomics (especially the economics of Keynes) and monetary theory. By careful and rigorous analysis in which nothing is taken for granted, she uncovers the implicit assumptions of economic theory and argues, in a variety of contexts, that differences of economic method and the influence of the stylised facts are decisive forces, both in the construction of theories and in appraising their contemporary relevance.
Author: Thomas A. Durkin
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195169921
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 737
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Consumer Credit and the American Economy examines the economics, behavioral science, sociology, history, institutions, law, and regulation of consumer credit in the United States. After discussing the origins and various kinds of consumer credit available in today's marketplace, this book reviews at some length the long run growth of consumer credit to explore the widely held belief that somehow consumer credit has risen "too fast for too long." It then turns to demand and supply with chapters discussing neoclassical theories of demand, new behavioral economics, and evidence on production costs and why consumer credit might seem expensive compared to some other kinds of credit like government finance. This discussion includes review of the economics of risk management and funding sources, as well discussion of the economic theory of why some people might be limited in their credit search, the phenomenon of credit rationing. This examination includes review of issues of risk management through mathematical methods of borrower screening known as credit scoring and financial market sources of funding for offerings of consumer credit. The book then discusses technological change in credit granting. It examines how modern automated information systems called credit reporting agencies, or more popularly "credit bureaus," reduce the costs of information acquisition and permit greater credit availability at less cost. This discussion is followed by examination of the logical offspring of technology, the ubiquitous credit card that permits consumers access to both payments and credit services worldwide virtually instantly. After a chapter on institutions that have arisen to supply credit to individuals for whom mainstream credit is often unavailable, including "payday loans" and other small dollar sources of loans, discussion turns to legal structure and the regulation of consumer credit. There are separate chapters on the theories behind the two main thrusts of federal regulation to this point, fairness for all and financial disclosure. Following these chapters, there is another on state regulation that has long focused on marketplace access and pricing. Before a final concluding chapter, another chapter focuses on two noncredit marketplace products that are closely related to credit. The first of them, debt protection including credit insurance and other forms of credit protection, is economically a complement. The second product, consumer leasing, is a substitute for credit use in many situations, especially involving acquisition of automobiles. This chapter is followed by a full review of consumer bankruptcy, what happens in the worst of cases when consumers find themselves unable to repay their loans. Because of the importance of consumer credit in consumers' financial affairs, the intended audience includes anyone interested in these issues, not only specialists who spend much of their time focused on them. For this reason, the authors have carefully avoided academic jargon and the mathematics that is the modern language of economics. It also examines the psychological, sociological, historical, and especially legal traditions that go into fully understanding what has led to the demand for consumer credit and to what the markets and institutions that provide these products have become today.
Author: Jonathan Elliot Goldberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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This thesis examines questions at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. Chapter 1 studies the persistent effects of a decrease in firms' ability to borrow. I develop a tractable model of deleveraging that emphasizes (i) firms as suppliers of financial assets to consumers and (ii) the ability of firms and consumers to alleviate financial frictions by accumulating wealth. In the model, a permanent decrease in the ability of firms to borrow leads to: increased capital misallocation and decreased total factor productivity (TFP); an increased wedge between the average marginal product of capital and the interest rate; and increased riskiness of consumption. An endogenous decrease in the interest rate is shown to amplify these effects by discouraging wealth accumulation. In a calibration using U.S. firm-level data, I find these amplification effects are large. Chapter 2 studies how proprietary trading and advising are combined on Wall Street even though a firm that engages in both of these activities may be tempted to mislead its clients. Chapter 3 studies the effects of government purchases of long-term debt. According to one interpretation, the preferred-habitat model of Vayanos and Vila (2009) implies that Federal Reserve purchases of long-term bonds generate a reduction in long-term interest rates. In this paper, I clarify this interpretation. In particular, in a Vayanos and Vila (2009) preferred-habitat model, I show that maturity-lengthening open-market operations have no effect on long-term interest rates if agents in the economy ultimately receive the profits from the government's portfolio via lump-sum taxes or transfers. I then introduce limited participation - an assumption that some agents are restricted from trading bonds of certain or all maturities. I show that limited participation implies that open-market operations do reduce the long-term interest rate. What drives this result is limited participation, not preferred-habitat preferences. With this motivation, I develop a model, with a more reasonable form of limited participation and without preferred-habitat preferences, in which open-market operations are relevant. Finally, I use these models to discuss how arbitrageurs' wealth covaries with technology or endowment shocks, and how this covariance is affected by open-market operations.
Author: Keshav Dogra
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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If retrading is possible, lending policy and debt postponement are superior to debt relief. The final chapter of my dissertation evaluates the impact of increased income uncertainty and financial liberalization in the US on consumption volatility and welfare at the household level. In this joint work with Olga Gorbachev, we estimate Euler equations using consumption data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and measure the volatility of unpredictable changes in consumption as the squared residuals. We directly control for liquidity constraints using data on access to credit from the Survey of Consumer Finances, and document that despite the increase in household debt between 1983 and 2007, there was no decline in the proportion of liquidity constrained households. Consumption volatility increased significantly over this period, especially for liquidity constrained households, indicating substantial welfare losses.
Author: Joshua Brock Mendel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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The Local Multiplier: Theory and Evidence. I show that 1) the policy-relevant "global multiplier" can be written as the sum of a spending component and a taxation component, all scaled up by spillover effects, 2) the "local multiplier" is exactly the spending com- ponent, and 3) if trade is anonymous, the local effects of a shock to federal government purchases in a county will be identical to the effects of a shock to consumer demand for the exports of that locality. I estimate a bound for the local multiplier and consider spillover effects to contiguous counties. I find that a shock of $48,000 creates at least one job-year locally. Analysis at a monthly frequency suggests that these jobs are more persistent than previously estimated. Evidence of higher multipliers in recessions is mixed.
