Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Macroeconomics and finance'

The thesis consists of four chapters. The introductory chapter clarifies different notions of rationality used by economists and gives a summary of the remainder of the thesis. Chapter 2 proposes an explanation for the common empirical observation of the coexistence of infrequently-changing regular price ceilings and promotion-like price patterns. The results derive from enriching an otherwise standard, albeit stylized, general equilibrium model with two elements. First, the consumer-producer interaction is modeled in the spirit of the price dispersion literature, by introducing oligopolistic markets, consumer search costs and heterogeneity. Second, consumers are assumed to be boundedly-rational: In order to incorporate new information about the general price level, they have to incur a small cognitive cost. The decision whether to re-optimize or act according to the obsolete knowledge about prices is itself a result of optimization. It is shown that in this economy, individual retail prices are capped below the monopoly price, but are otherwise flexible. Moreover, they have the following three properties: 1) An individual price has a positive probability of being equal to the ceiling. 2) Prices have a tendency to fall below the ceiling and then be reset back to the cap value. 3) The ceiling remains constant for extended time intervals even when the mean rate of inflation is positive. Properties 1) and 2) can be associated with promotions and properties 1) and 3) imply the emergence of nominal price rigidity. The results do not rely on any type of direct costs of price adjustment. Instead, price stickiness derives from frictions on the consumers’ side of the market, in line with the results of several managerial surveys. It is shown that the developed theory, compared to the classic menu costs-based approach, does better in matching the stylized facts about the reaction of individual prices to inflation. In terms of quantitative assessment, the model, when calibrated to realistic parameter values, produces median price ceiling durations that match values reported in empirical studies.

The starting point of the essay in Chapter 3 is the observation that the baseline New-Keynesian model, which relies solely on the notion of infrequent price adjustment, cannot account for the observed degree of inflation sluggishness. Therefore, it is a common practice among macro- modelers to introduce an ad hoc additional source of persistence to their models, by assuming that price setters, when adjusting a price of their product, do not set it equal to its unobserved individual optimal level, but instead catch up with the optimal price only gradually. In the paper, a model of incomplete adjustment is built which allows for explicitly testing whether price-setters adjust to the shocks to the unobserved optimal price only gradually and, if so, measure the speed of the catching up process. According to the author, a similar test has not been performed before. It is found that new prices do not generally match their estimated optimal level. However, only in some sectors, e.g. for some industrial goods and services, prices adjust to this level gradually, which should add to the aggregate inflation sluggishness. In other sectors, particularly food, price-setters seem to overreact to shocks, with new prices overshooting the optimal level. These sectors are likely to contribute to decreasing the aggregate inflation sluggishness. Overall, these findings are consistent with the view that price-setters are boundedly-rational. However, they do not provide clear-cut support for the existence of an additional source of inflation persistence due to gradual individual price adjustment. Instead, they suggest that general equilibrium macroeconomic models may need to include at least two types of production sectors, characterized by a contrasting behavior of price-setters. An additional finding stemming from this work is that the idiosyncratic component of the optimal individual price is well approximated by a random walk. This is in line with the assumptions maintained in most of the theoretical literature.

Chapter 4 of the thesis has been co-authored by Julia Lendvai. In this paper a full-fledged production economy model with Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory features is constructed. The agents’ objective function is assumed to be a weighted sum of the usual utility over consumption and leisure and the utility over relative changes of agents’ wealth. It is also assumed that agents are loss-averse: They are more sensitive to wealth losses than to gains. Apart from the changes in the utility, the model is set-up in a standard Real Business Cycle framework. The authors study prices of stocks and risk-free bonds in this economy. Their work shows that under plausible parameterizations of the objective function, the model is able to explain a wide set of unconditional asset return moments, including the mean return on risk-free bonds, equity premium and the Sharpe Ratio. When the degree of loss aversion in the model is additionally assumed to be state-dependent, the model also produces countercyclical risk premia. This helps it match an array of conditional moments and in particular the predictability pattern of stock returns.
Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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.
Economics

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2013.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 142-150).
The first chapter proposes a model of booms and busts in housing and non-housing consumption driven by the interplay between relatively low interest rates and an expansion of credit, triggered by further decline in interest rates and relaxing collateral requirements. When credit becomes available, households would like to borrow in order to frontload consumption, and this increases demand for housing and non-housing consumption. If the increase in the demand for housing translates into an increase in prices, then credit is fueled further, this time endogenously, because of the role of housing as collateral. Because a lifetime budget constraint still applies, even in the absence of a financial crisis, the initial expansion in housing and non-housing consumption will be followed by a period of contraction, with declining consumption and house prices. My mechanism clarifies that boom-bust dynamics will be accentuated in regions with inelastic supply of housing and muted in elastic regions. In line with qualitative predictions of my model, I provide evidence that differences in regions' elasticity of housing and initial relaxation of collateral constraints can explain most of the 2000-2006 boom and the subsequent bust in house prices and consumption across US counties. The second chapter (co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James Kwak and Todd Mitton) studies the value of political connections during turbulent times and shows the announcement of Tim Geithner as President-elect Obamas nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a personal connection. This return was around 15 percent from day 0 through day 10, relative to other comparable financial firms. This result holds across a range of robustness checks and regardless of whether we measure connections in terms of meetings he had in 2007-08, non-profit board memberships he shared with financial services executives, or firms with headquarters in New York City. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithners conrmation might be derailed by tax issues. We argue that this value of connections reflects the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small network of financial sector executives during a time of acute crisis and heightened policy discretion. The third chapter (co-authored with Adam Ashcraft and Kunal Gooriah) studies the impact of skin-in-the game on the performance of securitized assets using evidence from conduit commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS) market. A unique feature of this market is that an informed investor purchases the bottom 5 percent of the capital structure, known as the B-piece, conducting independent screening of loans from which all other investors benefit. However, during the recent credit boom, a secondary market for B-pieces developed, permitting these investors to significantly reduce their skin in the game. In this paper, we document, that after controlling for all information available at issue, the percentage of the B-piece that is sold by these investors has a significant adverse impact on the probability that more senior tranches ultimately default. The result is robust to the use of an instrumental variables strategy which relies on the greater ability of larger B-piece buyers to to sell these positions given the need for large pools of collateral. Moreover we show the risk associated with this agency problem was not priced.
by Amir Reza Mohsenzadeh Kermani.
Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2013.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-94).
This thesis studies the role of the financial system in the amplification and propagation of business cycles. Chapter 1 studies the origin and propagation of balance sheet recessions. I first show that in standard models driven by TFP shocks, the balance sheet channel disappears when agents are allowed to write contracts on the aggregate state of the economy. In contrast, I show how uncertainty shocks can drive balance sheet recessions with depressed asset prices and growth, and trigger a "flight to quality" event with low interest rates and high risk-premia. Uncertainty shocks create an endogenous hedging motive that induces financial intermediaries to take on a disproportionate fraction of aggregate risk, even when contracts can be written on the aggregate state of the economy. Finally, I explore some implications for financial regulation. Chapter 2 studies a tractable model of dynamic moral hazard with purely pecuniary private benefits. The agent can trade a productive asset and secretly divert funds to a private account and use them to "recontract": at any time he can offer a new continuation contract to the principal, who accepts if the new contract is attractive. The main result is that the optimal contract can be characterized as the solution to a standard portfolio problem with a simple "skin in the game" constraint. The setting places few restrictions on preferences and the distribution of shocks, distinguishes between (observable) aggregate shocks and (unobservable) idiosyncratic shocks, and takes arbitrary general equilibrium prices as given. This makes the results easily applicable to many macro and financial applications. Chapter 3 explores under what conditions the presence of moral hazard can create a balance sheet amplification channel. If the private action of the agent exposes him to aggregate risk through his unobserved private benefit, the optimal contract will try to over-expose him to aggregate risk to deter him from misbehaving. This creates a tradeoff between aggregate and idiosyncratic risk-sharing. More productive agents naturally want to leverage more and therefore have larger incentives to distort their aggregate risk-sharing in order to reduce their exposure to idiosyncratic risk. In equilibrium, therefore, more productive agents take on a disproportionate fraction of aggregate risk, creating a balance sheet channel.
by Sebastian T. Di Tella.
Ph.D.

Thesis advisor: Susanto Basu
The goal of this dissertation is to shed some light on three separate aspects of the financial system that can lead to greater instability in the banking sector and greater macroeconomic volatility. The starting point of the Great Recession was the collapse of the banking sector in late 2007; in the subsequent months, liquidity evaporated in many markets for short term funding. The process of creating liquidity carried out by the banking system involves the transformation of long term illiquid assets into short term liquid liabilities. This engine functions properly as long as cash lenders continue to roll over short term funding to banks; whenever these lenders fear that banks will not be able to pay back these obligations, they immediately stop funding banks' short term liabilities. This makes banks unable to repay maturing short term debt, which leads to large spikes in default risk. This is often referred to as a modern bank run. Virtually all the theories of bank runs suggest that the severity of a run depends on how well lenders can coordinate their beliefs: whenever a lender expects many others to run, he becomes more likely to run as well. In a joint work with Emanuele Brancati, the first chapter of my dissertation, we empirically document the role of coordination in explaining bank runs and default risk. We establish two new results. First, when information is more precise and agents can better coordinate their actions, a change in market expectations has a larger impact on default risk; this implies that more precise information increases the vulnerability or instability of the banking system. This result has a clear policy implication: if policymakers want to stabilize the banking system they should promote opacity instead of transparency, especially during periods of financial turmoil. Second, we show that when a bank is expected to perform poorly, lower dispersion of beliefs actually increases default risk; this result is in contrast with standard theories in finance and can be rationalized by thinking about the impact that more precise information has on the ability of creditors to coordinate on a bank run. Another aspect of the banking system that is creating a lot of instability in Europe is the so called "disastrous banks-sovereign nexus": many banks in troubled countries owned a disproportionately large amount of domestic sovereign bonds; therefore, in case of a default of the sovereign country, the whole domestic banking sector would incur insurmountable losses. This behavior is puzzling because these banks in troubled countries would greatly benefit from having a more diversified asset portfolio, but instead decide to load up with domestic sovereign debt only. In a joint work with Filippo De Marco, the second chapter of my dissertation, we show that banks receive political pressures from their respective governments to load up on domestic sovereigns. First, we show that banks with a larger fraction of politicians as shareholders display greater home bias. More importantly, we exploit the fact that low-performing banks received liquidity injections by their domestic governments to show that, among those banks, only the "political banks" drastically increased their home bias upon receiving government help. Furthermore, it appears that the extent of political pressure on banks is much stronger on those "political banks" belonging to troubled countries. These findings suggest that troubled countries that would need to pay a high premium to issue new debt force their "political banks" to purchase part of the debt issuance. This greater risk-synchronization can create a dangerous loop of higher sovereign default risk leading to insolvency of the domestic banking system, which in turn would require a bail-out from the local government, further exacerbating the sovereign de- fault risk. Finally, the third chapter of my dissertation, a joint work with Susanto Basu, investigates the sources of excess consumption volatility in emerging markets. It is a well documented fact that, in emerging markets, consumption is more volatile than output whereas the opposite is true in developed economies. We propose an explanation for this phenomenon that relies on a specific form of financial markets incompleteness: we assume that households would always want to front-load consumption and they can borrow from abroad up to a fraction of the value of posted collateral. With the value of collateral being procyclical, households are able to increase borrowing during an expansion and ultimately consume more than they produce; this mechanism is then able to generate a ratio of consumption volatility to output volatility grater than one. Most importantly, the model delivers the implication that a better ability to borrow vis-a-vis the same value of collateral generates greater relative consumption volatility. We then bring this model's implication to the data and find empirical support for it. We proxy the ability to borrow with various measures of effectiveness of lending regulation and more standard indicators of financial development. Consistent with the model's implication, more lending friendly regulation leads to greater relative consumption volatility in emerging markets; moreover, this link breaks down among developed countries. In addition, among emerging countries, it appears that deeper domestic capital markets have a destabilizing effect in terms of greater relative consumption volatility while a more developed domestic banking system does not exerts any such detrimental effect
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

Thesis advisor: Fabio Schiantarelli
Thesis advisor: Zhijie Xiao
This dissertation consists of three essays in macroeconomics and finance. The first and second chapters analyze the impact of the financial shocks and anti-corruption campaign on Chinese firms through the bank lending channel. The third chapter provides a new method to predict the cash flow from operations (CFO) via semi-parametric estimation and machine learning. The first chapter explores the impact of the financial crisis and sovereign debt crisis on Chinese firms through the bank lending channel and firm borrowing channel. Using new data linking Chinese firms to their bank(s) and four different measurements of exposure to the international markets (international borrowing, importance of lending to foreign listed companies, share of trade settlement, and exchange/income), I find that banks with higher exposure to the international markets cut lending more during the recent financial crisis. In addition, state-owned bank loans are more pro-cyclical compared with private bank loans. Moreover, banks with higher exposure to the international markets cut lending more when there is a negative shock in OECD GDP growth. With regard to firm borrowing channel, I find that firms with higher weighted aggregate exposure to the international markets through banks have lower net debt, cash, employment, and capital investment during the financial crisis. Firms with higher weighted aggregate exposure to the global markets have higher net debt and lower cash, employment, and capital investment when there is a negative shock in OECD GDP growth. This paper also provides a theoretical model to explain the mechanism in a partially opened economy like China. The second chapter discusses the impact of the anti-corruption campaign on Chinese firms through the bank lending channel. Using confidential data linking Chinese firms to their bank(s) and prefecture-level corruption index, I find that banks located in more corrupted prefectures offer significantly less credits before the anti-corruption investigation, and this effect changes the direction after the investigation. Moreover, banks located in more corrupted prefectures tend to use higher interest rates, longer maturity, and more collateral before the campaign, all of these effects change the direction after the campaign. This paper suggests that the banks located in more corrupted prefectures have stronger monopoly power (or higher markup, and lower efficiency). This monopoly effect could be proved by that the bank concentration ratio is higher, and the bad loans of the banks are higher in the more corrupted areas, and all of these effects disappear after the campaign. The third chapter considers the methods of prediction of Cash flow from operations (CFO). Forecasting CFO is an essential topic in financial econometrics and empirical accounting. It impacts a variety of economic decisions, including valuation methodologies employing discounted cash flows, distress prediction, risk assessment, the accuracy of credit-rating predictions, and the provision of value-relevant information to security markets. Existing literature on statistically-based cash-flow prediction has pursued cross-sectional versus time-series estimation procedures in a mutually exclusive fashion. Cumulated empirical evidence indicates that the beta value varies across firms of different sizes, and the cross-sectional regression can not capture an idiosyncratic beta. However, although a time series based predictive model has the advantage of allowing for firm-specific variability in beta, it requires a long enough time series data. In this paper, we extend the literature on statistically-based, cash-flow prediction models by introducing an estimation procedure that, in essence, combine the favorable attributes of both cross-sectional estimation via the use of "local" cross-sectional data for firms of similar size and time-series estimation via the capturing of firm-specific variability in the beta parameters for the independent variables. The local learning approach assumes no a priori knowledge on the constancy of the beta coefficient. It allows the information about coefficients to be represented by only a subset of observations. This feature is particularly relevant in the CFO model, where the beta values are only related to cross-sectional data information that is "local" to its size. We provide empirical evidence that the prediction of cash flows from operations is enhanced by jointly adopting features specific to both cross-sectional and time-series modeling simultaneously
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

Thesis advisor: Matthew O. Jackson
In this dissertation, I focus on networks in macroeconomics and finance. In Chapter 1, I develop a theoretical model of rescue of distressed financial institutions. I study rescues in a coalition formation framework, which provides new insights into the financial contagion and stability and rescue of systemically important financial institutions. The findings show that the levels of negative shock, bankruptcy costs, interbank obligations of each financial firm and the topology of the interbank network all together determine financial firms’ contributions in rescues, where government assistance in rescues is not required in certain types of network structures. In Chapter 2, which is a joint work with Matthew O. Jackson, we study the impacts of sector level technological changes on wage inequality and GDP growth in production networks. Our results show that the macroeconomic implications of sector level technological changes depend on additional factors than the input-output structure such as type of the intermediate good (e.g., substitutes for labor vs complements to labor), task weights in production processes and labor supply. Chapter 1. I model bank rescues in a setting where banks hold each other’s financial instruments creating a network of financial linkages. Costly bankruptcies reduce interbank payments, which creates incentives for rescues by other banks. Accordingly, I analyze the sources of inefficiencies in bank rescues and show that the social welfare is maximized if regulators promote financial networks that are evenly connected (without disconnectedness/clustering) and have intermediate levels of interbank liabilities at bank level. Such networks maximize banks’ total contributions to the rescue of a distressed bank hit by a relatively small negative shock, but also ensure that banks do not fail sequentially like dominos when a bank hit by a large shock does actually fail. The results also provide a rationale for why some systemically important banks were not rescued in 2007-2008. In the model, a social welfare maximizing government assists the rescues designed to prevent the potential contagious failures and maintain financial stability instead of assisting the rescue of a bank that is hit by a large shock. Chapter 2. We study the impact of technological change on wage inequality and GDP growth in production networks. We do this in a simple model that contrasts the effects of changes in intermediate goods that substitute for labor with those that complement labor. Technological changes in intermediate goods that complement labor result in increased GDP and do not change relative wages. Technological changes in intermediate goods that substitute for (low-skilled) labor involve three phases: pre-automation, transition to automation, and post-automation. During the transition phase, technological changes in such intermediate good lead to increased wage inequality and relatively smaller increases in GDP than comparable changes in complementary goods. In addition, our results show that firm-level weights of tasks performed by different types of labor play key roles in macroeconomic network consequences of interconnectedness
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

I present a thesis in three chapters on the topics of Macroeconomics and Finance. In the first chapter, I study the ex ante effects of the fear of future financial crises. Crises are modelled through multiple equilibria driven by a self-fulfilling fall in asset prices. I study the effects of allowing agents to anticipate such an event. In a financial crisis, capital is pushed away from experts and towards less productive households, worsening the allocation of capital. Anticipation of this lowers asset prices, investment, and growth today, even if experts are currently well enough capitalised to survive a crisis. The possibility of future crises also creates a state-dependent“financial crisis accelerator” which can amplify business-cycle shocks. In the model, prudential policy can simultaneously increase growth and stabilise the economy, in contrast with common arguments that prudential policy should decrease growth. In the second chapter, I present evidence that countries which experienced greater declines in total factor productivity (TFP) during the Great Recession experienced milder contractions in hours worked. Thus I show that there is a tension between the crisis manifesting itself either as a problem with productivity or with labour markets. Additionally, countries with larger falls in real wages tend to be those with TFP, and not labour market, problems. Inspired by these facts, I build a model of sticky wages, and prove that wage adjustment determines the extent to which a financial crisis leads to declines in TFP or hours worked. Larger falls in real wages protect labour markets from reductions in hours. However, lower real wages reduce the incentive to reallocate resources across firms during the crisis, leading to larger declines in productivity. In the final chapter, I introduce financial frictions into the labour market matching model, and study interactions between the two frictions. I demonstrate a feedback between asset and labour markets which amplifies the model’s response to exogenous shocks. Shocks which increase equity holders’ net worth allow them to fund more vacancies, raising market tightness and lowering the ease with which firms can hire workers. This increases the value of being an existing firm, causing stock prices to appreciate. This increases experts’ net worth further, amplifying the initial shock in a mechanism akin to the traditional financial accelerator. I derive an arbitrage equation in my model similar to the standard free entry condition. I show that any matching model which possesses this arbitrage equation, including the standard matching model, is able to match 82% of the volatility in US market tightness if calibrated to match the volatility in asset prices.

This thesis consists of three chapters on topics in macroeconomics and finance. In the first chapter, I use texts from corporate filings of US companies to investigate if liquidity shortages that occurred during the late-2000 financial crisis were different from cases that occur during more normal times. In the second chapter, I quantify narrative evidence from corporate filings to construct a novel dataset on the price-setting behavior of companies. I then use this dataset to investigate what factors cause firms to change the prices of their products or prevent them from doing so. In the third chapter, I use a number of high-frequency financial market estimates to identify the monetary policy shock in a non-recursive Factor Augmented Vector Autoregression of monthly frequency.
Esta tesis consta de tres capítulos sobre temas de macroeconomía y finanzas. En el primer capítulo, utilizo textos de presentaciones corporativas estadounidenses para investigar si las faltas de liquidez que se produjeron durante la crisis financiera de finales del 2000 fueron diferentes de los casos que ocurren durante tiempos más normales. En el segundo capítulo, cuantifico evidencia narrativa de presentaciones corporativas para construir un nuevo conjunto de datos sobre el comportamiento de fijación de precios de las empresas. Luego utilizo este conjunto de datos para investigar qué factores hacen que las empresas cambien o dejen sin cambios los precios de sus productos. En el tercer capítulo, utilizo un número de estimaciones de datos financieros de alta frecuencia para identificar el shock de política monetaria en un modelo FAVAR de frecuencia mensual.

Derivation and Estimation of a New Keynesian Phillips Curve in a Small Open Economy This paper explores how well Swedish inflation is explained by a New Keynesian Phillips Curve. As the real driving variable in the Phillips Curve, a measure of firms' real marginal cost is compared to the traditional output gap. The results show that, with real marginal cost in the Phillips Curve equation, the point estimates generally have the expected positive sign, which is less frequently the case with the output gap. However, with both real marginal cost and the output gap, it is difficult to pin down a statistically significant relationship with inflation. Firm-Level Evidence of Shifts in the Supply of Credit This paper examines empirically whether firms are subject to shifts in credit supply over the business cycle. Shifts in the supply of credit are identified by exploring how firms substitute between commitment credit -- lines of credit -- and non-commitment credit. The results show that firms on average rely more on commitment credits when monetary policy is tight and when the financial health of banks is weaker. The results are consistent with a bank lending channel of monetary policy and with shifts in the supply of credit following deteriorations in banks' balance sheets. Lines of Credit and Investment: Firm-Level Evidence of Real Effects of the Financial Crisis This paper studies how the 2008 financial crisis affected corporate investment in Sweden through its effect on credit availability. The approach is to compare investments of firms before and after the onset of the crisis as a function of their ex ante sensitivity to a credit supply shock, controlling for fundamental determinants of investments. Sensitivity to a credit supply shock is measured as credit reserves, defined as unused credit on lines of credit. The results indicate that the decline in investment following the crisis was not exacerbated by a contraction in the supply of credit.

This work provides an empirical examination of the relationship between macroeconomics and finance. In particular, we exploit non linear econometric methods to analyse the information content of the term structure of interest rates. We find that both monetary and financial variables are useful to predict the future evolution of economic activity.

This dissertation contains three chapters and focuses on the optimal design of fiscal policy, both from a theoretical and from a quantitative perspective. In the first chapter, “Wealth Taxation and Life Expectancy,” I address the optimal taxation of wealth in a class of dynastic overlapping-generations economies with heterogeneous mortality risk. Working individuals are indexed by skills which are private information. Skills not only determine earning abilities but also correlate with survival probability, so that more productive agents on average live longer. The analysis distinguishes between the tax treatment of two possible sources of wealth, namely, savings and bequests, and points to the mortality gradient as a crucial determinant for optimal wealth taxation. Specifically, due to differential mortality: (a) earned wealth should be marginally taxed, (b) transferred wealth via bequests should be marginally subsidized, and (c) marginal tax schedules on bequests and inter-vivos transfers should be separated. I calibrate the model to U.S. data and quantitatively evaluate its tax implications. For the median worker, mortality differences create a force for marginally taxing capital mortality differences create a force for marginally taxing savings by up to 1.7%, and for marginally subsidizing bequests by as much as 3.4%. These figures are robust to the value of the societal intergenerational discount factor and can yield significant welfare gains. In the second chapter, “Taxing Atlas: Using Firm Data to Derive Optimal Income Tax Rates” (joint with Laurence Ales and Jessie J. Wang), we analyze the optimal taxation of top labor incomes. Top income earners are modeled as managers who are heterogeneous across skills and operate a span-of-control technology, as in Rosen (1982). Managers privately observe their skill level, which increases the productivity of both effort and supervision, thus creating a scale-of-operations effect. We characterize optimal taxes in this environment and identify novel determinants linked to firm technology. Our main result is that to be consistent with U.S. firm data, the optimal top income tax rate should be roughly in line with the U.S. tax code, in contrast to previous results in the literature. In the third chapter, “Regional State Capacity and the Optimal Degree of Fiscal Decentralization” (joint with Martín Besfamille), we study the optimal degree of fiscal decentralization in a federation. In our environment, regional governments are characterized by two dimensions of state capacity; namely, administrative and fiscal. These gauge the ability to deliver public goods and to raise tax revenues, respectively. Two regimes are compared: partial and full decentralization. Under partial decentralization, regional governments have no tax powers and rely on central bailouts to refinance incomplete projects. Under full decentralization, regional governments refinance incomplete projects through capital taxes, in a context of tax competition. We show how the optimal degree of fiscal decentralization hinges on the relative magnitudes of each type of capacity. Specifically, for sufficiently low levels of fiscal capacity, bailing out regional governments is optimal regardless of the level of administrative ability. However, a combination of low levels of administrative capacity and high levels of fiscal capacity calls for fully decentralizing tax powers.

COORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DO PESSOAL DE ENSINO SUPERIOR
Nesta tese são desenvolvidos três ensaios nos quais foram utilizados arcabouços de finanças com o objetivo de estudar três questões de macroeconomia aplicada. No primeiro ensaio mostramos que, no Brasil, surpresas inflacionárias de curto prazo têm causado desvios nas expectativas inflacionárias de médio prazo. Tal fato obstrui parcialmente um importante canal de transmissão da política monetária, o canal das expectativas. A indexação da economia não parece ser a única responsável pelo fenômeno já que há também efeito significativo destas surpresas no prêmio de risco inflacionário. Portanto, concluímos que a credibilidade da política monetária no período analisado (2001- 2006) não foi perfeita, apesar de ter melhorado significativamente com o passar do tempo. No segundo ensaio analisamos o saldo da conta- corrente como um problema de alocação de portfólio. Mostramos que, empiricamente, o rebalanceamento do portfólio dos países é fundamental e, por esta razão, apresentamos um novo modelo para a conta-corrente no qual as oportunidades de investimento internas e externas são variantes no tempo. Com isso, o ativo externo líquido ótimo varia no tempo gerando um novo mecanismo de variações na contacorrente. Estimamos o modelo para os EUA e Japão e os resultados indicam um poder explicativo superior ao dos modelos tradicionais. O terceiro e último ensaio da tese, investiga um dos determinantes da fragilidade econômico-financeira de países emergentes: a correlação positiva entre o risco país e o risco cambial. Mostramos que a presença deste fenômeno não é generalizada por todos os países emergentes. Além disso, os responsáveis pela inter-relação são, segundo nossos resultados: (i) o descasamento cambial e (ii) o nível de aprofundamento financeiro, medido pelo crédito doméstico ao setor privado.
In this thesis we develop three essays on Macro-Finance. On the first one, we show that, in Brazil, short run inflation surprises had a significant effect in medium run inflation expectation. This phenomenon leads to a less effective monetary policy, as its output cost is higher. This can be a symptom of at least one of two problems: (i) Inflation inertia due to indexation of the economy; and/or (ii) lack of credibility of the monetary authority. As our model suggests, looking at co-movements of inflation risk premium and inflation surprises helps to identify if lack of credibility is one of the causes. By doing so, we confirm that this was the case in Brazil until very recently. On the second essay, we argue that the current account problem can be understood as the choice of where to allocate national savings: at home or abroad. Moreover, the data reveals that portfolio rebalance is indeed important. For this reason, we develop a current account model in which the representative agent´s portfolio choice problem with time- varying investment opportunities. Thus, we are able to generate rebalancing in portfolios that in turn affects the current account. We estimate/solve this model using a long time series data from different assets in the US and Japan and empirical results indicate that variations in investment opportunities can explain at least 54% of its movements, a performance superior to previous models. The third and last essay studies one important source of financial vulnerability for emerging economies: the positive correlation between country and currency risks. This harmful relation observed in some countries is called cousin risks. We, first, identify the extent of this phenomenon by separating a sample of countries into two groups: the one where the positive correlation is observed and the one where it is not. Based on this taxonomy, we investigate the determinants of the cousin risks. Results indicate that currency mismatch and low financial deepening are strongly associated with the phenomenon.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005.
"February 2005."
Includes bibliographical references (p. 246-256).
In the first chapter I investigate whether firms' physical investments react to the speculative over-pricing of their securities. I introduce investment considerations in an infinite horizon continuous time model with short sale constraints and heterogeneous beliefs along the lines of Scheinkman and Xiong (2003) and obtain closed form solutions for all quantities involved. I show that market based q and investment are increased, even though such investment is not warranted on the basis of long run value maximization. I use a simple episode to test the hypothesis that investment reacts to over-pricing. With publicly available data on short sales during the 1920's, I examine both the price reaction and the investment behavior of a number of companies that were introduced into the "loan crowd" during the first half of 1926. In line with Jones and Lamont (2002), I interpret this as evidence of overpricing due to speculation. I find that investment by these companies follows both the increase and the decline in "q" before and after the introduction, suggesting that companies in this sample reacted to security over-pricing. In the next chapter of the thesis (co-authored with E. Farhi) we study optimal consumption and portfolio choice in a framework where investors save for early retirement. We assume that agents can adjust their labor supply only through an irreversible choice of their retirement time. We obtain closed form solutions and analyze the joint behavior of retirement time, portfolio choice, and consumption. In the final chapter of the thesis (co-authored with R. Caballero) we turn attention to hedging of sudden stops. We observe that even well managed emerging market economies are exposed to significant external risk, the bulk of which is financial. We focus on the optimal financial policy of such an economy under different imperfections and degrees of crowding out in its hedging opportunities.
by Stavros Panageas.
Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
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.
by Jonathan E. Goldberg.
Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 189-198).
This thesis consists of four essays on finance, learning, and macroeconomics. The first essay studies whether learning can explain why the standard consumption-based asset pricing model produces large pricing errors for U.S. equity returns. I prove that under learning standard moment conditions need not hold in finite samples, leading to pricing errors. Simulations show that learning can generate quantitatively realistic pricing errors and a substantial equity risk premium. I find that a model with learning is not rejected in the data, producing pricing errors that are statistically indistinguishable from zero. The second essay (co-authored with Anna Mikusheva) studies the properties of the common impulse response function matching estimator (IRFME) in settings with many parameters. We prove that the common IRFME is consistent and asymptotically normal only when the horizon of IRFs being matched grows slowly enough. We use simulations to evaluate the performance of the common IRFME in a practical example, and we compare it with an infrequently used bias corrected approach, based on indirect inferences. Our findings suggest that the common IRFME performs poorly in situations where the sample size is not much larger than the horizon of IRFs being matched, and in those situations, the bias corrected approach with bootstrapped standard errors performs better. The third essay (co-authored with Ricardo Caballero) documents that, in contrast with their widely perceived excess return, popular carry trade strategies yield low systemicrisk- adjusted returns. In contrast, hedging the carry with exchange rate options produces large returns that are not a compensation for systemic risk. We show that this result stems from the fact that the corresponding portfolio of exchange rate options provides a cheap form of systemic insurance. The fourth essay shows that the documented overbidding in pay-as-you-go auctions relative to a static model can be explained by the presence of a small subset of aggressive bidders. I argue that aggressive bidding can be rational if users are able to form reputations that deter future competition, and I present empirical evidence that this is the case. In auctions without any aggressive bidders, there is no evidence of overbidding in PAYGA.
by Joseph Buchman Doyle, Jr.
Ph.D.

Thesis advisor: Peter N. Ireland
This dissertation examines three topics in computational macroeconomics and finance. The first two chapters are closely linked; and the third chapter covers a separate topic in finance. Throughout the dissertation, I place a strong emphasis on constructing computational tools and modeling devices; and using them in appropriate applications. The first chapter examines how a central banks choice of interest rate rule impacts the rate of mortgage default and welfare. In this chapter, a quantitative equilibrium (QE) model is constructed that incorporates incomplete markets, aggregate uncertainty, overlapping generations, and realistic mortgage structure. Through a series of counterfactual simulations, five things are demonstrated: 1) nominal interest rate rules that exhibit cyclical behavior increase the average default rate and lower average welfare; 2) welfare can be substantially improved by adopting a modified Taylor rule that stabilizes house prices; 3) a decrease in the length of the interest rate cycle will tend to increase the average default rate; 4) if the business and housing cycles are not aligned, then aggressive inflation targeting will tend to increase the mortgage default rate; and 5) placing a legal cap on loan-to-value ratios will lower the average default rate and lessen the intensity of extreme events. In addition to these findings, this paper also incorporates an important mechanism for default, which had not pre- viously been included in the QE literature: default spikes happen when income falls and home equity is degraded at the same time. The paper concludes with a policy recommendation for central banks: if they wish to crises where many households default simultaneously, they should either adopt a rule that generates interest rates with slow-moving cycles or use a modified Taylor rule that also targets house price growth. The second chapter generalizes the solution method used in the first and compares it to more common techniques used in the computational macroeconomics literature, including the parameterized expectations approach (PEA), projection methods, and value function iteration. In particular, this chapter compares the speed and accuracy of the aforementioned modifications to an alternative method that was introduced separately by Judd (1998), Sutton and Barto (1998), and Van Roy et al. (1997), but was not developed into a general solution method until Powell (2007) introduced it to the Operations Research literature. This approach involves rewriting the Bellman equation in terms of the post-decision state variables, rather than the pre-decision state variables, as is done in standard dynamic programming applications in economics. I show that this approach yields considerable performance benefits over common global solution methods when the state space is large; and has the added benefit of not forcing modelers to assume a data generating process for shocks. In addition to this, I construct two new algorithms that take advantage of this approach to solve heterogenous agent models. Finally, the third chapter imports the SIR model from mathematical epidemiol- ogy; and uses it to construct a model of financial epidemics. In particular, the paper demonstrates how the SIR model can be microfounded in an economic context to make predictions about financial epidemics, such as the spread of asset-backed securities (ABS) and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the proliferation of zombie financial institutions, and the expansion of financial bubbles and mean-reverting fads. The paper proceeds by developing the 1-host SIR model for economic and financial contexts; and then moves on to demonstrate how to work with the multi-host version of the model. In addition to showing how the SIR framework can be used to model economic interactions, it will also: 1) show how it can be simulated; 2) use it to develop and estimate a sufficient statistic for the spread of a financial epidemic; and 3) show how policymakers can impose the financial analog of herd immunity-that is, prevent the spread of a financial epidemic without completely banning the asset or behavior associated with the epidemic. Importantly, the paper will focus on developing a neutral framework to describe financial epidemics that can be either bad or good. That is, the general framework can be applied to epidemics that constitute a mean-reverting fad or an informational bubble, but ultimately yield little value and shrink in importance; or epidemics that are long-lasting and yield a new financial in- strument that generates permanent efficiency gains or previously unrealized hedging opportunities
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

Thesis advisor: Robert Murphy
The following three essays address two issues that have gained much recent attention among macroeconomists. The first essay - "International Policy Coordination: Policy Analysis in a Staggered Wage-setting Model" - deals with the incentives for countries to coordinate monetary and fiscal policies in an environment where the countries differ only in the length of the labor contracts which typify their respective economies. The second essay - "Tests for Liquidity Constraints: A Critique" and the third essay - "Liquidity Constraint Volatility: Evidence from Post-war Aggregate Time-series Data" - are tests of the importance and persistence of liquidity constraints in determining consumption behavior in the United States using micro-based data and aggregate timeseries data, respectively
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 1988
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

Thesis advisor: Fabio Ghironi
My dissertation develops a set of tools for introducing heterogeneity into economic models in an analytically tractable way. Many models use the representative agent framework, which greatly simplifies macroeconomic aggregation but abstracts from the heterogeneity we see in the real world. In my research, I move away from the representative agent framework in two key ways. First, my work in international macroeconomics incorporates heterogeneity via idiosyncratic shocks across countries. Second, my work on financial frictions employs asymmetric information between lenders and borrowers. In both of these areas, my goal is to examine the implications of heterogeneity in the most tractable way possible. Crucially, these insights can be incorporated into the models currently used by academics and central banks for policy analysis. The first chapter of my dissertation, "Price Stability in Small Open Economies," joint work with Mikhail Dmitriev, studies the conduct of optimal monetary policy in a continuum of small open economies. We obtain a novel closed-form solution that does not restrict the elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods to one. Using this global closed-form solution, we give an exact characterization of optimal monetary policy and welfare with and without international policy cooperation. We consider the cases of internationally complete asset markets and financial autarky, producer currency pricing and local currency pricing. Under producer currency pricing, it is always optimal to mimic the flexible-price equilibrium through a policy of price stability. Under local currency pricing, policy should fix the exchange rate. Even though countries have monopoly power, the continuum of small open economies implies that policymakers cannot affect world income. This inability to influence world income removes the incentive to deviate from price stability under producer currency pricing or a fixed exchange rate under local currency pricing, and prevents gains from international monetary cooperation in all cases examined. Our results contrast with those for large open economies, where interactions between home policy and world income drive optimal policy away from price stability or fixed exchange rates, and gains from cooperation are present. The second chapter of my dissertation, "The Optimal Design of a Fiscal Union'', joint work with Mikhail Dmitriev, examines the role of fiscal policy cooperation and financial market integration in an open economy setting, motivated by the recent crisis in the euro area. I show that the optimal design of a fiscal union is governed by the degree of substitutability between the export goods of different countries. When countries produce goods that are imperfect substitutes they should harmonize their income taxes to prevent large terms of trade externalities. On the other hand, when countries produce goods that are close substitutes, they should organize a contingent fiscal transfer scheme to insure against idiosyncratic shocks. The welfare gains from the optimal fiscal union are as high as 5\% of permanent consumption when countries are able to trade safe government bonds, and approach 20\% of permanent consumption when countries lose access to international financial markets. These gains are especially large for countries like Greece that produce highly substitutable export goods and who cannot raise funds on international financial markets to insure against downside risk. The results illustrate why federal currency unions such as the U.S., Canada and Australia, with income tax harmonization and built-in fiscal transfer arrangements, withstand asymmetric shocks across regions much better than the euro area, which lacks these ingredients at the moment. The third chapter of my dissertation, joint work with Mikhail Dmitriev, studies macro-financial linkages and the impact of financial frictions on real economic activity in some of my other work. Beginning with the Bernanke-Gertler-Gilchrist (1999) financial accelerator model, a large literature has shown that financial frictions amplify business cycles. Using this framework, Christiano, Motto and Rostagno (AER, 2013) show that shocks to financial frictions can explain business cycle fluctuations quite well. However, this literature relies on two ad hoc assumptions. When these assumptions are relaxed and agents have access to a broader set of lending contracts, the financial accelerator disappears, and shocks to financial frictions have little to no impact on the economy. In addition, under the ad hoc lending contract inflation targeting eliminates the financial accelerator. These results provide guidance for monetary policymakers and present a puzzle for macroeconomic theory
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

This thesis consists of three essays at the intersection of macroeconomics and corporate finance. The broad theme that links the three chapters is the study of how endogenous borrowing constraints that affect firms and financial intermediaries influence aggregate investment. In Chapter I, the existing theoretical framework studying how financial constraints in firms may make economies more sensitive to shocks (the 'financial accelerator') is extended to take account of firms' precautionary investment behaviour when they anticipate future liquidity constraints. This behaviour is at the source of a powerful amplification mechanism of shocks, and is also able to account for the documented dynamics of the composition of investment across the business cycle: in particular how risky, illiquid investment as a share of total investment fluctuates both at the firm and at the aggregate level. Chapter II studies how the public supply of liquidity affects the private creation of liquidity by firms (inside liquidity), and how this interacts with firms' demand for liquidity to influence investment and capital accumulation. The conditions under which government debt may boost or reduce private investment are shown to depend on three channels: (1) a crowding-in effect, by enhancing aggregate liquidity, (2) a crowding-out effect, by reducing the collateral value of entrepreneurial assets and (3) a redistributive effect. The model also shows how a production economy with endogenous liquidity can help resolve some important asset pricing puzzles. Finally, the business cycle properties of the model are studied. Chapter III shows how recent developments in financial markets may have made economies less vulnerable to banking crises as they widen access to liquidity, but by relaxing financial constraints facing financial intermediaries, they imply that, should a crisis occur, its impact could be more severe than previously. These effects may be reinforced by greater macroeconomic stability. Finally, financial intermediaries are shown to under-insure and over-borrow from a constrained-efficient viewpoint.

This collection of essays examines the topic of macroeconomic stabilisation in an international context, focusing on monetary policy, capital controls and exchange rates. Chapter 1, written in collaboration with Giancarlo Corsetti and Joao Duarte, reconsiders the effects of common monetary policy shocks across countries in the euro area, using a data-rich factor model and identifying shocks with high-frequency surprises around policy announcements. We show that the degree of heterogeneity in the response to shocks, while being low in financial variables and output, is significant in consumption, consumer prices and macro variables related to the labour and housing markets. Mirroring country-specific institutional and market differences, we find that home ownership rates are significantly correlated with the strength of the housing channel in monetary policy transmission. We document a high dispersion in the response to shocks of house prices and rents and show that, similar to responses in the US, these variables tend to move in different directions. In Chapter 2, I build a two-country, two-good model to examine the welfare effects of capital controls, finding that under certain circumstances, a shut-down in asset trade can be a Pareto improvement. Further, I examine the robustness of the result to parameter changes, explore a wider set of policy instruments and confront computational issues in this class of international macroeconomic models. I document that within an empirically relevant parameter span for the trade elasticity, the gains from capital controls might be significantly larger than suggested by previous contributions. Moreover, I establish that a refined form of capital controls in the shape of taxes and tariffs cannot improve upon the outcome under financial autarky. Finally, results show that the conjunction of pruning methods and endogenous discount factors can remove explosive behaviour from this class of models and restore equilibrating properties. In Chapter 3, I use a panel of 20 emerging market currencies to assess whether a model that combines fundamental and non-fundamental exchange rate forecasting approaches can successfully predict risk premia (i.e. currency excess returns) over the short horizon. In doing so, I aim to overcome three main shortcomings of earlier research: i) Sensitivity to the chosen sample period; ii) seemingly arbitrary selection of explanatory variables that differs from currency to currency; and iii) difficulty in interpreting forecasts beyond the numerical signal. Based on a theoretical model of currency risk premia, I use real exchange rate strength combined with indicators for carry, momentum and economic sentiment to homogeneously forecast risk premia across all 20 currencies in the sample at a monthly frequency. In doing so, the model remains largely agnostic about structural choices, keeping arbitrarily imposed restrictions to a minimum. Results from portfolio construction suggest that returns are significant and robust both across currencies as well as over time, with Sharpe Ratios in out-of-sample tests above 0.7.

Thesis advisor: Pablo Guerron
The dissertation examines how fiscal policies adjust to economic states in a growth model where productions are mobile across jurisdictions and the corresponding consequences. In my work, I study the properties of optimal state-level corporate and labor income tax rates and how shocks in the federal tax rates affect the economy; and I endogenize the federal-level fiscal policies in a Stackelberg game setting where the federal government is the leader and the states are the followers. In “Fiscal Competition and Federal Shocks”, I answer such the question of “how a shock to federal tax rate affect the macro-economy”. The innovation is that I take into account the effects of factor mobility, state-federal interaction, and state-state interaction on the transmission mechanism of the federal shocks. By using the U.S. data set, I find the evidence that state-level tax rates will respond to changes in federal tax rates (known as vertical competition) and the neighboring state's policies (known as horizontal competition). To rationalize this finding, I develop a two-region growth model with benevolent state governments, integrated capital market, and sticky migration. My quantitative result indicates that omitting the endogenous responses of state-level policies leads to significant difference in response to a federal shock. This means that the central policy make has to consider the intergovernmental fiscal relations when designing federal fiscal policies. In “Optimal Policies in a Federation”, I examine the optimal federal and state fiscal policies in a dynamic macro model with policy commitment, integrated capital market, and inter-state migration. In modeled governance system, the federal government is the Stackelberg leader, the state governments are the followers and take the leader's policies as given. In the interior-point steady-state, the overall tax rate on corporate income is zero. However, the leader and followers impose different tax rates. The leader levies a positive and high tax rate, the followers levy negative tax rates. The zero (overall) tax rate result holds when the states are heterogeneous in their TFPs. If the federal government has to impose the same labor income tax rate on the states, the federal tax rates are independent of the degree of inequality and each state has a zero overall corporate tax rate. IF the federal labor tax system is nonlinear, the states impose different tax rates. But the tax-base-weighted overall tax rate in the economy is still zero. In addition, I find that increasing the federal corporate tax rate is the optimal response to foreign country's TFP becomes higher
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

The way in which governments borrow has changed dramatically over the last decade. The first two chapters of this dissertation study the implications of the rise of local currency sovereign borrowing in emerging markets. Chapter 1 presents a method to measure the credit risk on local currency sovereign debt. Chapter 2 argues that private sector balance sheet mismatch explains why nominal sovereign debt risk is not free from default risk. Chapter 3 studies the costs of sovereign default by exploiting the timing of legal rulings in the case of Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital to identify the causal effect of increases in sovereign default risk on firm performance.
Political Economy and Government

Cette dissertation se compose de quatre chapitres. Le premier chapitre analyse la soutenabilité de la dette souveraine lorsque le souverain peut compenser ses résidents afin de réduire les possibles effets collatéraux d’un défaut. Il y est montré qu’en l’absence de coûts de réputation, la dette souveraine est soutenable sous la condition que les expositions domestiques ne soient pas observables par le souverain. Le deuxième chapitre étend cette analyse au cas de deux pays où le secteur privé de l’un peut être exposé à la dette souveraine de l’autre. Je montre alors qu’en case de défaut souverain, il peut être optimal de compenser le secteur privé en rachetant la dette souveraine en défaut. Ex ante, il en résulte une garantie implicite sur les dettes souveraines. Le troisième chapitre considère l’interaction entre dette souveraine et politiques fiscales. Il établit que lorsque l’économie domestique est Ricardienne, le gouvernement peut parfaitement compenser ses résidents and, ainsi, il n’y a pas de coûts internes à faire défaut. Il caractérise ensuite les déviations de l’équivalence Ricardienne qui sont à même de soutenir la dette souveraine Le quatrième chapitre, coécrit avec Roberto Pancrazi, étudie l’impact théorique des coûts de participation aux marchés d’assurance sur leur capacité à lisser leur consommation en présence de risques de revenue idiosyncrasiques. Cet impact théorique est ensuite confronté aux données
This dissertation is made of four distinct chapters. In the first chapter, I investigate sovereign debt repayment incentives when countries can implement domestic transfers to mitigate internal costs of default. I show that, in the absence of reputation costs and international sanctions, sovereign repayment emerges as an equilibrium outcome if and only if individual domestic exposures to the domestic debt are not observable by the government. In the second chapter, I extend this mechanism to a two-country situation where one country's private sector is exposed to the second country's sovereign debt. I show that, in case of the second country's default, the optimal compensation can take the form of a purchase of the defaulting bonds. Ex ante, this leads to the existence of an implicit guarantee on sovereign debts. In the third chapter, I consider the connection between sovereign debt repayment incentives and domestic fiscal and redistributive policies. I establish that when the domestic economy is Ricardian, the government can perfectly compensate domestic agents and, thus, no internal cost of default emerges. Then I characterize deviations from Ricardian equivalence that are able to sustain external debt. In the fourth chapter, coauthored with Roberto Pancrazi, we investigate the impact of participation costs to insurance markets on households' ability to smooth consumption. We build a model where households face idiosyncratic risks against which they can purchase insurance, provided that they pay a fixed participation cost. We then confront our results to households' consumption data

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This thesis is dedicated to study of tax schedule. I investigate how a tax schedule could affect the individuals’ choice and consequently the resources of the country. I show how a tax schedule induce the individuals’ choice, defining hence the allocations of labor, output and consumption of society. In the first and the second chapters I examine the taxation of individuals, while in the third and the fourth chapter I analyze the incidence of levies on different agents of economy. In the chapter one, I examine the optimal tax schedule, following Mirrlees (1971) e Saez (2001). I show how would be the optimal tax schedule in Brazil, charactering by a deeper income inequality among the individuals. Moreover, I investigate a affine tax schedule, that is considered an alternative tax schedule between the current and optimal tax schedule. In the second chapter I analyze the tax schedule known as equal sacrifice. I show how the tax schedule derived by Young (1987), that was renewed by Berliant and Gouveia (1993), behavior itself in the efficiency test derived byWerning (2007). In the third and the fourth chapter I examine how tax reform proposals would affect the Brazilian’s economy. In the third chapter I investigate how a tax reform affects different social classes. In chapter four, I study the better directions to a tax reform in Brazil, showing which rearrange of levies is the less inefficient to the country. In the end, I investigate the effects of two tax reform proposals in the Brazilian economy. I define the gains of output and welfare in each proposal. I call the special attention to gains/loses of short run, because they could make no possible to approve a tax reform, even though the reform could good effects in the long run.
Esta tese dedica-se ao estudo dos sistemas tributários. Eu investigo como um sistema tributário afeta as escolhas dos indivíduos e consequentemente os recursos do país. Eu mostro como um sistema tributário induz as escolhas das pessoas, determinado assim as alocações de trabalho, produto e consumo da economia. No primeiro e segundo capítulo eu examino a taxação sobre os indivíduos, enquanto que no terceiro e quarto capítulos analiso a incidîncia tributária sobre os diferentes agentes da sociedade. No capítulo um, eu examino o sistema tributário ótimo, seguindo Mirrlees (1971) e Saez (2001). Eu mostro como seria este sistema tributário no Brasil, país com profunda desigualdade de renda entre os indivíduos. Ademais, eu investigo o sistema tributário afim, considerado uma alternativa entre os sistemas atual e o ótimo. No segundo capítulo eu analiso o sistema tributário conhecido como sacríficio igual. Mostro como o sistema tribuária derivado por Young (1987), redesenhado por Berliant and Gouveia (1993), se comporta no teste de eficiência derivado por Werning (2007). No terceiro e quarto capítulo eu examino como propostas de reforma tribuária afetariam a economia brasileira. No capítulo três investigo como uma reforma tributária atingiria as diferentes classes socias. No capítulo quatro, eu estudo as melhores direções para uma reforma tributária no Brasil, mostrando qual arranjo de impostos é menos ineficiente para o país. Por fim, investigo os efeitos de duas propostas de reforma tributária sobre a economia brasileira. Explicito quais os ganhos de produto e bem estar de cada proposta. Dedico especial atenção aos ganhos/perdas de curto prazo, pois estes podem inviabilizar uma reforma tributária, mesmo esta gerando ganhos de longo prazo.

Thesis advisor: Fabio Schiantarelli
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2009, academics and policymakers have worked to empirically quantify macro-financial linkages. This dissertation contributes to this debate by covering two broad themes. First, substantial changes in bank regulation and supervision typically follow financial crises. Quantifying the impact of these new policies is of paramount importance to academics and policymakers. To this end, my research in this area sheds light on the ways in which changes in financial stability policy ultimately affect the economy. Bank stress testing has become a major tool of supervisory policy in the past decade. The first chapter, The Real Effects of Stress Testing, uses the introduction of annual stress testing of large U.S. banks in 2009 as a quasi-experiment to examine whether bank supervisory policies affect real economic activity. While stress-tested banks reduced their risk exposure to large corporate loans, foreign banks mostly offset this shock and enabled firms to continue borrowing after the test. However, speculative grade firms that were highly exposed to stress-tested banks borrowed on worse terms after the test, and subsequently reduced fixed investment and employment. In contrast, highly exposed investment grade firms received new loans and expanded intangible investment. This paper provides insights into the effects of stress testing on the reallocation of risks in the financial system and the consequences for real economic activity. The structure of the U.S. mortgage market has experienced dramatic changes in recent years, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the major government-sponsored enterprises or GSEs) faced substantial reforms to their business practices. An important feature of regulatory reform included changing the pricing of loan guarantees on mortgage-backed securities insured by the GSEs, in particular removing the subsidy paid by small lenders to large lenders in 2012. The second chapter of this dissertation, Lender Cross-Subsidization and Credit Supply in the Fannie Mae MBS Market (co-authored with Igor Karagodsky), shows that the removal of this subsidy resulted in a relative increase in mortgage lending by small lenders. However, states with relatively higher concentrations of large lenders experienced relative reductions in credit following the removal of these subsidies. This research underscores an important link between lender market power and credit supply. Understanding the drivers of the fluctuations in bond returns is a central question in finance. Theoretically, unexpected bond returns should reflect either changes in expectations of future short-term rates or future compensation for risk. The third chapter of this dissertation, Survey Forecasts and Bond Return Decompositions, revisits this question using survey forecasts of professional economists to measure expectations of interest rates and returns, rather than with a statistical model. Two main results emerged from this analysis: (1) News about future short-term interest rates explains relatively more of the variation in unexpected excess bond returns for short-maturity bonds relative to long-maturity bonds. (2) The share of news explained by future short-term interest rates increases with horizon for all maturities. This analysis contributes to the recent academic literature that highlights the importance of subjective expectations in understanding asset-price movements
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University
This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the information contained in the pricing of a set of financial contracts for identifying mechanisms important for shaping aggregate outcomes. The first chapter documents a large time-varying dispersion in the yields posted on insured time deposits over 1997-2011. The yield dispersion uncovers the presence of monopoly power over a homogeneous financial product that commercial banks have managed to consistently exploit throughout this period. I build and estimate a structural asset pricing model with heterogeneous search cost investors to characterize the implied search cost distribution that rationalizes the observed price dispersion. A large fraction of investors had high search costs ranging from 10 to 20 basis points per deposit offer. I further relate the observed price dispersion with the price rigidity of deposit yields and their asymmetric response to aggregate shocks within the theoretical framework of costly search. Extending the time deposit dataset to the pricing of non-insured time deposits, the second chapter studies the liability side of FDIC insured commercial banks as a unique laboratory for testing the importance of the government supply of safe and liquid assets for determining asset prices and allocations. An increase in the level of government debt and shortening of its maturity have a contractionary effect on the banks' balance sheets. The effect increases with the share of insured deposits in the total funding. The results provide evidence for a strong crowding-out effect of government debt on the banking system's capacity to attract cheap sources of funding in the form of deposits and hence its ability to extend loans. The third chapter identifies disruptions in credit markets using a broad array of credit spreads constructed directly from the secondary bond prices on outstanding senior unsecured debt issued by a large panel of nonfinancial firms. The portfolio-based bond spreads contain substantial predictive power for economic activity and outperform standard default-risk indicators. According to impulse responses from a structural factor-augmented vector autoregression, identified credit shocks lead to large and persistent contractions in economic activity and account for more than 30 percent of the forecast error variance in economic activity at the two- to four-year horizon during the 1990-2008 period.

This dissertation includes three chapters. The first chapter studies the question of whether countries with different fiscal capacity should optimally have different ex-ante minimum bank capital requirements. In an environment with endogenously incomplete markets and overinvestment because of moral hazard and pecuniary externalities, I show that countries with larger fiscal capacity should have lower minimum ex-ante bank capital requirements. I also show that, in addition to the minimum capital requirement, regulators in countries with a concentrated financial sector and large fiscal capacity (which are also countries with strong moral hazard) should impose a limit on the amount of liquidity pledged by financial institutions in a crisis state (for example, restrict the amount of put options/CDS contracts sold by financial institutions). The second chapter studies the welfare implications of a concentrated, imperfectly competitive banking sector, which faces a bank net worth constraint in a small open economy (SOE) environment. There are two standard sources of inefficiency --- pecuniary externalities, which lead to overinvestment, and a standard monopolistic underinvestment force. I show that the optimal policy instruments include subsidies on firm borrowing costs in certain periods and capital account controls in others, which is a good proxy for the behavior of emerging markets. For every country, there exists a financial sector with a particular banking sector concentration, for which the inefficiencies offset each other and no government intervention is required in some periods. Furthermore, this paper documents a novel theoretical result --- the interaction between future binding bank net worth constraints and dynamic (future) underinvestment could lead to ex-ante overinvestment even in economies with a single monopolistic bank where there are no pecuniary externalities. The last third chapter, which is coauthored with Kenneth Rogoff, evaluates a new class of exchange rate forecasting studies, which claim that structural models are getting closer to being able to forecast exchange rates at short horizons. We argue that misinterpretation of some new out-of-sample tests for nested models, over-reliance on asymptotic test statistics, and failure to sufficiently check robustness to alternative time windows have led many studies to overstate even the relatively thin positive results that have been found.
Economics

Thesis advisor: Ryan Chahrour
Expectations formation is central to macroeconomics. Households, firms, and policymakers must form expectations not only about fundamentals, but about what other agents’ beliefs are, because others’ beliefs will determine their actions. The three essays in this dissertation examine empirically and theoretically how agents use both public and private information to form expectations. The first two essays combine a models of optimizing behavior and forecasting with data on the macroeconomy, financial prices, and macroeconomic forecasts to examine the extent to which economic agents learn about the macroeconomy from financial prices and monetary policy actions. The third essay examines theoretically how members of a committee use public and private information to form beliefs when they care both about having accurate forecasts and coordinating actions with others. All three essays emphasize that frictions in expectations formation are a salient feature of the world, and understanding the extent and importance of those frictions is important for both positive and normative questions in macroeconomics and finance. Beliefs about the future determine the willingness of financial market participants to save and invest, and theory suggests they should value more highly assets which are expected to pay higher returns during recessionary periods when consumption is otherwise low. Hence, financial prices reflect macroeconomic expectations. In the first essay, titled "Macroeconomic Disagreement in Treasury Yields," I explore how agents with idiosyncratic, private information form beliefs about both the macroeconomy and the beliefs of other agents. Using data on United States Treasury debt, the macroeconomy, and individual inflation forecasts, I estimate the precision of bond traders’ information about the macroeconomy and how much they disagree with each other. I allow for traders to learn both from private signals and from asset prices, which aggregate the beliefs of all the traders in the market. I find that bond prices are moderately informative about macroeconomic variables, but are the source of most of the information traders have about monetary policy and the beliefs of others. In contrast to studies which assume full information, risk premia are much less important than slow-adjusting interest rate expectations for explaining the behavior of long-run yields. The most important signal for bond traders appears to be the Federal Reserve’s short-run rate, which encodes information about the macroeconomy and the central bank’s intended future policy. Nevertheless, the fact that traders held disparate beliefs about the macroeconomy, and especially about the long-run inflation target of the Federal Reserve, elevated long-term yields on average. The first essay demonstrates empirically that financial market participants learn about the macroeconomy from monetary policy actions. However, it is silent on how monetary policymakers form beliefs about the macroeconomy, or how the information in monetary policy rates endogenously affects macroeconomic outcomes. In the second essay "Your Guess is as Good as Mine: Central Bank Information and Monetary Policy," I use data on private sector forecasts and forecasts from the Federal Reserve Board staff to examine the typical assumption of common information between firms and monetary policymakers. Using forecasts from a survey of professional forecasters and from the Federal Reserve Board staff, I show evidence against the typical assumption of common information between monetary policymakers and the private sector, and also that policymakers are, at best, only weakly better at forecasting than private forecasters. Based on this evidence, I augment an otherwise standard monetary policy model by relaxing the common information assumption. Instead, I assume there is idiosyncratic, private information among price-setting firms, and between firms and the central banker. Firms combine private information about aggregate conditions with the observed monetary policy rate to form expectations about fundamentals and the beliefs of rival firms. The central banker must form expectations about firms’ beliefs because those beliefs will determine inflation and overall economic activity. But as a result of their differences in information sets, firms must form expectations about other firms’ expectations, and what the central banks’ expectations of their expectations are. I examine the ability of this model to fit the data and find that the model can capture features of both firm and central bank inflation expectations, but in the absence of imperfect information among households, it is difficult to simultaneously match the forecast data and data on real activity. This result points to the sensitivity of models with dispersed information to the underlying assumptions about how central bankers will respond to exogenous shocks. The second chapter emphasized how the assumptions economists make regarding monetary policymakers’ information is critical for understanding their actions. Motivated by this example, my third chapter "Information Investment in a Coordination Game" explores theoretically how members of a committee who are uncertain about others’ beliefs decide on a binary action, and how their decision to pay close attention to public or private signals is related to their desire to accurately forecast versus coordinating their behavior with others. I show that when it is assumed that information decisions among committee members are symmetric - everyone pays the same amount of attention to the same things - there is a unique outcome of the coordination game. However, I further show that it is difficult to guarantee that committee members will all choose a symmetric allocation of information. Aside from the direct cost of acquiring better information, allocating attention to more accurate signals can harm welfare when coordination motives are dominant. In a set of numerical exercises, however, I show that it is possible for a unique equilibrium to exist, and that actions that do not have a large impact on the payoffs of committee members (such as changing the size of the committee) may nevertheless have large impacts on the accuracy of the committee’s forecasts. This suggests a possible tension between the welfare of the committee, which benefits from consensus, and the welfare of those affected by the committee’s actions, which likely depends on whether the committee takes the objectively correct action. My dissertation has important implications for both academic economists and policymakers. Understanding the sources of business cycle fluctuations and the determinants of asset prices requires grappling with the fact that people have differences in beliefs. Empirical evidence suggests that agents’ beliefs are shaped by both idiosyncratic forces and by public announcements and policy decisions, and economists’ models need to reflect these features of the world. Policy, too, is affected by the information available to policymakers, and to understand how policymakers have acted in the past and should act in the future, it is necessary to take seriously the ways their belief formation deviates from the full information rational expectations benchmark

Cette thèse examine l’effet de l’information sur la prévision macroéconomique. De façon spécifique, l’emphase est d’abord mise sur l’impact des frictions d’information en économie ouverte sur la prévision du taux de change bilatéral et ensuite sur le rôle de l’information issue des données d’enquêtes de conjoncture dans la prévision de l’activité économique réelle. Issu du paradigme de la nouvelle macroéconomie ouverte (NOEM), le premier essai intègre des frictions d’informations et des rigidités nominales dans un modèle d’équilibre général dynamique stochastique (DSGE) en économie ouverte. Il présente ensuite une analyse comparative des résultats de la prévision du taux de change obtenu en utilisant le modèle avec et sans ces frictions d’information. Tandis que le premier essai développe un modèle macroéconomique structurel de type DSGE pour analyser l’effet de la transmission des choc en information incomplète sur la dynamique du taux de change entre deux économies, le deuxième et troisième essais utilisent les modèles factorielles dynamiques avec ciblage pour mettre en exergue la contribution de l’information contenu dans les données d’enquêtes de confiance (soit au niveau de l’économie nationale que internationale) sur la prévision conjoncturelle de l’activité économique réelle. « The Forward Premium Puzzle : a Learning-based Explanation » (Essai 1) est une contribution à la littérature sur la prévision du taux de change. Cet essai a comme point de départ le résultat théorique selon lequel lorsque les taux d’intérêt sont plus élevés localement qu’ils le sont à l’étranger, cela annonce une dépréciation future de la monnaie locale. Cependant, les résultats empiriques obtenus sont généralement en contradiction avec cette intuition et cette contradiction a été baptisée l’énigme de la parité des taux d’intérêt non-couverte ou encore «énigme de la prime des contrats à terme ». L’essai propose une explication de cette énigme basée sur le mécanisme d’apprentissage des agents économiques. Sous l’hypothèse que les chocs de politique monétaire et de technologie peuvent être soit de type persistant et soit de type transitoire, le problème d’information survient lorsque les agents économiques ne sont pas en mesure d’observer directement le type de choc et doivent plutôt utiliser un mécanisme de filtrage de l’information pour inférer la nature du choc. Nous simulons le modèle en présence de ces frictions informationnelles, et ensuite en les éliminant, et nous vérifions si les données artificielles générées par les simulations présentent les symptômes de l’énigme de la prime des contrats à terme. Notre explication à l’énigme est validée si et seulement si seules les données générées par le modèle avec les frictions informationnelles répliquent l’énigme. « Using Confidence Data to Forecast the Canadian Business Cycle » (Essai 2) s’appuie sur l’observation selon laquelle la confiance des agents économiques figure désormais parmi les principaux indicateurs de la dynamique conjoncturelle. Cet essai analyse la qualité et la quantité d’information contenu dans les données d’enquêtes mesurant la confiance des agents économiques. A cet effet, il évalue la contribution des données de confiance dans la prévision des points de retournement (« turning points ») dans l’évolution de l’économie canadienne. Un cadre d’analyse avec des modèles de type probit à facteurs est spécifié et appliqué à un indicateur de l’état du cycle économique canadien produit par l’OCDE. Les variables explicatives comprennent toutes les données canadiennes disponibles sur la confiance des agents (qui proviennent de quatre enquêtes différentes) ainsi que diverses données macroéconomiques et financières. Le modèle est estimé par le maximum de vraisemblance et les données de confiance sont introduites dans les différents modèles sous la forme de variables individuelles, de moyennes simples (des « indices de confiance ») et de « facteurs de confiance » extraits d’un ensemble de données plus grand dans lequel toutes les données de confiance disponibles ont été regroupées via la méthode des composantes principales, . Nos résultats indiquent que le plein potentiel des données sur la confiance pour la prévision des cycles économiques canadiens est obtenu lorsque toutes les données sont utilisées et que les modèles factoriels sont utilisés. « Forecasting with Many Predictors: How Useful are National and International Confidence Data? » (Essai 3) est basé sur le fait que dans un environnement où les sources de données sont multiples, l’information est susceptible de devenir redondante d’une variable à l’autre et qu’une sélection serrée devient nécessaire pour identifier les principaux déterminants de la prévision. Cet essai analyse les conditions selon lesquelles les données de confiance constituent un des déterminants majeurs de la prévision de l’activité économique dans un tel environnement. La modélisation factorielle dynamique ciblée est utilisé pour évaluer le pouvoir prédictif des données des enquêtes nationales et internationales sur la confiance dans la prévision de la croissance du PIB Canadien. Nous considérons les données d’enquêtes de confiance désagrégées dans un environnement riche en données (c’est-à-dire contenant plus d’un millier de séries macro-économiques et financières) et évaluons leur contenu informatif au-delà de celui contenu dans les variables macroéconomiques et financières. De bout en bout, nous étudions le pouvoir prédictif des données de confiance en produisant des prévisions du PIB avec des modèles à facteurs dynamiques où les facteurs sont dérivés avec et sans données de confiance. Les résultats montrent que la capacité de prévision est améliorée de façon robuste lorsqu’on prend en compte l’information contenue dans les données nationales sur la confiance. En revanche, les données internationales de confiance ne sont utiles que lorsqu’elles sont combinées dans le même ensemble avec celles issues des enquêtes nationales. En outre, les gains les plus pertinents dans l’amelioration des prévisions sont obtenus à court terme (jusqu’à trois trimestres en avant).
Cette thèse examine l’effet de l’information sur la prévision macroéconomique. De façon spécifique, l’emphase est d’abord mise sur l’impact des frictions d’information en économie ouverte sur la prévision du taux de change bilatéral et ensuite sur le rôle de l’information issue des données d’enquêtes de conjoncture dans la prévision de l’activité économique réelle. Issu du paradigme de la nouvelle macroéconomie ouverte (NOEM), le premier essai intègre des frictions d’informations et des rigidités nominales dans un modèle d’équilibre général dynamique stochastique (DSGE) en économie ouverte. Il présente ensuite une analyse comparative des résultats de la prévision du taux de change obtenu en utilisant le modèle avec et sans ces frictions d’information. Tandis que le premier essai développe un modèle macroéconomique structurel de type DSGE pour analyser l’effet de la transmission des choc en information incomplète sur la dynamique du taux de change entre deux économies, le deuxième et troisième essais utilisent les modèles factorielles dynamiques avec ciblage pour mettre en exergue la contribution de l’information contenu dans les données d’enquêtes de confiance (soit au niveau de l’économie nationale que internationale) sur la prévision conjoncturelle de l’activité économique réelle. « The Forward Premium Puzzle : a Learning-based Explanation » (Essai 1) est une contribution à la littérature sur la prévision du taux de change. Cet essai a comme point de départ le résultat théorique selon lequel lorsque les taux d’intérêt sont plus élevés localement qu’ils le sont à l’étranger, cela annonce une dépréciation future de la monnaie locale. Cependant, les résultats empiriques obtenus sont généralement en contradiction avec cette intuition et cette contradiction a été baptisée l’énigme de la parité des taux d’intérêt non-couverte ou encore «énigme de la prime des contrats à terme ». L’essai propose une explication de cette énigme basée sur le mécanisme d’apprentissage des agents économiques. Sous l’hypothèse que les chocs de politique monétaire et de technologie peuvent être soit de type persistant et soit de type transitoire, le problème d’information survient lorsque les agents économiques ne sont pas en mesure d’observer directement le type de choc et doivent plutôt utiliser un mécanisme de filtrage de l’information pour inférer la nature du choc. Nous simulons le modèle en présence de ces frictions informationnelles, et ensuite en les éliminant, et nous vérifions si les données artificielles générées par les simulations présentent les symptômes de l’énigme de la prime des contrats à terme. Notre explication à l’énigme est validée si et seulement si seules les données générées par le modèle avec les frictions informationnelles répliquent l’énigme. « Using Confidence Data to Forecast the Canadian Business Cycle » (Essai 2) s’appuie sur l’observation selon laquelle la confiance des agents économiques figure désormais parmi les principaux indicateurs de la dynamique conjoncturelle. Cet essai analyse la qualité et la quantité d’information contenu dans les données d’enquêtes mesurant la confiance des agents économiques. A cet effet, il évalue la contribution des données de confiance dans la prévision des points de retournement (« turning points ») dans l’évolution de l’économie canadienne. Un cadre d’analyse avec des modèles de type probit à facteurs est spécifié et appliqué à un indicateur de l’état du cycle économique canadien produit par l’OCDE. Les variables explicatives comprennent toutes les données canadiennes disponibles sur la confiance des agents (qui proviennent de quatre enquêtes différentes) ainsi que diverses données macroéconomiques et financières. Le modèle est estimé par le maximum de vraisemblance et les données de confiance sont introduites dans les différents modèles sous la forme de variables individuelles, de moyennes simples (des « indices de confiance ») et de « facteurs de confiance » extraits d’un ensemble de données plus grand dans lequel toutes les données de confiance disponibles ont été regroupées via la méthode des composantes principales, . Nos résultats indiquent que le plein potentiel des données sur la confiance pour la prévision des cycles économiques canadiens est obtenu lorsque toutes les données sont utilisées et que les modèles factoriels sont utilisés. « Forecasting with Many Predictors: How Useful are National and International Confidence Data? » (Essai 3) est basé sur le fait que dans un environnement où les sources de données sont multiples, l’information est susceptible de devenir redondante d’une variable à l’autre et qu’une sélection serrée devient nécessaire pour identifier les principaux déterminants de la prévision. Cet essai analyse les conditions selon lesquelles les données de confiance constituent un des déterminants majeurs de la prévision de l’activité économique dans un tel environnement. La modélisation factorielle dynamique ciblée est utilisé pour évaluer le pouvoir prédictif des données des enquêtes nationales et internationales sur la confiance dans la prévision de la croissance du PIB Canadien. Nous considérons les données d’enquêtes de confiance désagrégées dans un environnement riche en données (c’est-à-dire contenant plus d’un millier de séries macro-économiques et financières) et évaluons leur contenu informatif au-delà de celui contenu dans les variables macroéconomiques et financières. De bout en bout, nous étudions le pouvoir prédictif des données de confiance en produisant des prévisions du PIB avec des modèles à facteurs dynamiques où les facteurs sont dérivés avec et sans données de confiance. Les résultats montrent que la capacité de prévision est améliorée de façon robuste lorsqu’on prend en compte l’information contenue dans les données nationales sur la confiance. En revanche, les données internationales de confiance ne sont utiles que lorsqu’elles sont combinées dans le même ensemble avec celles issues des enquêtes nationales. En outre, les gains les plus pertinents dans l’amelioration des prévisions sont obtenus à court terme (jusqu’à trois trimestres en avant).
This thesis examines the effect of information on macroeconomic forecasting. Specifically, the emphasis is firstly on the impact of information frictions in open economy in forecasting the bilateral exchange rate and then on the role of information from confidence survey data in forecasting real economic activity. Based on the new open-economy macroeconomics paradigm (NOEM), the first chapter incorporates information frictions and nominal rigidities in a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium (DSGE) model in open economy. Then, it presents a comparative analysis of the results of the exchange rate forecast obtained using the model with and without these information frictions. While the first chapter develops a structural macroeconomic model of DSGE type to analyze the effect of shock transmission in incomplete information on exchange rate dynamics between two economies, the second and third chapters use static and dynamic factor models with targeting to highlight the contribution of information contained in confidence-based survey data (either at the national or international level) in forecasting real economic activity. The first chapter is entitled The Forward Premium Puzzle: a Learning-based Explanation and is a contribution to the exchange rate forecasting literature. When interest rates are higher in one’s home country than abroad, economic intuition suggests this signals the home currency will depreciate in the future. However, empirical evidence has been found to be at odds with this intuition: this is the "forward premium puzzle." I propose a learning-based explanation for this puzzle. To do so, I embed an information problem in a two-country open-economy model with nominal rigidities. The information friction arises because economic agents do not directly observe whether shocks are transitory or permanent and must infer their nature using a filtering mechanism each period. We simulate the model with and without this informational friction and test whether the generated artificial data exhibits the symptoms of the forward premium puzzle. Our leaning-based explanation is validated as only the data generated with the active informational friction replicates the puzzle. The second chapter uses dynamic factor models to highlight the contribution of the information contained in Canadian confidence survey data for forecasting the Canadian business cycle: Using Confidence Data to Forecast the Canadian Business Cycle is based on the fact that confidence (or sentiment) is one key indicators of economic momentum. The chapter assesses the contribution of confidence -or sentiment-data in predicting Canadian economic slowdowns. A probit framework is applied to an indicator on the status of the Canadian business cycle produced by the OECD. Explanatory variables include all available Canadian data on sentiment (which arise from four different surveys) as well as various macroeconomic and financial data. Sentiment data are introduced either as individual variables, as simple averages (such as confidence indices) and as confidence factors extracted, via principal components’ decomposition, from a larger dataset in which all available sentiment data have been collected. Our findings indicate that the full potential of sentiment data for forecasting future business cycles in Canada is attained when all data are used through the use of factor models. The third chapter uses dynamic factor models to highlight the contribution of the information contained in confidence survey data (either in Canadian or International surveys) for forecasting the Canadian economic activity. This chapter entitled Forecasting with Many Predictors: How Useful are National and International Confidence Data? is based on the fact that in a data-rich environment, information may become redundant so that a selection of forecasting determinants based on the quality of information is required. The chapter investigates whether in such an environment; confidence data can constitute a major determinant of economic activity forecasting. To do so, a targeted dynamic factor model is used to evaluate the performance of national and international confidence survey data in predicting Canadian GDP growth. We first examine the relationship between Canadian GDP and confidence and assess whether Canadian and international (US) improve forecasting accuracy after controlling for classical predictors. We next consider dis-aggregated confidence survey data in a data-rich environment (i.e. containing more than a thousand macroeconomic and financial series) and assess their information content in excess of that contained in macroeconomic and financial variables. Throughout, we investigate the predictive power of confidence data by producing GDP forecasts with dynamic factor models where the factors are derived with and without confidence data. We find that forecasting ability is consistently improved by considering information from national confidence data; by contrast, the international counterpart are helpful only when combined in the same set with national confidence. Moreover most relevant gains in the forecast performance come in short-horizon (up to three-quarters-ahead).
This thesis examines the effect of information on macroeconomic forecasting. Specifically, the emphasis is firstly on the impact of information frictions in open economy in forecasting the bilateral exchange rate and then on the role of information from confidence survey data in forecasting real economic activity. Based on the new open-economy macroeconomics paradigm (NOEM), the first chapter incorporates information frictions and nominal rigidities in a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium (DSGE) model in open economy. Then, it presents a comparative analysis of the results of the exchange rate forecast obtained using the model with and without these information frictions. While the first chapter develops a structural macroeconomic model of DSGE type to analyze the effect of shock transmission in incomplete information on exchange rate dynamics between two economies, the second and third chapters use static and dynamic factor models with targeting to highlight the contribution of information contained in confidence-based survey data (either at the national or international level) in forecasting real economic activity. The first chapter is entitled The Forward Premium Puzzle: a Learning-based Explanation and is a contribution to the exchange rate forecasting literature. When interest rates are higher in one’s home country than abroad, economic intuition suggests this signals the home currency will depreciate in the future. However, empirical evidence has been found to be at odds with this intuition: this is the "forward premium puzzle." I propose a learning-based explanation for this puzzle. To do so, I embed an information problem in a two-country open-economy model with nominal rigidities. The information friction arises because economic agents do not directly observe whether shocks are transitory or permanent and must infer their nature using a filtering mechanism each period. We simulate the model with and without this informational friction and test whether the generated artificial data exhibits the symptoms of the forward premium puzzle. Our leaning-based explanation is validated as only the data generated with the active informational friction replicates the puzzle. The second chapter uses dynamic factor models to highlight the contribution of the information contained in Canadian confidence survey data for forecasting the Canadian business cycle: Using Confidence Data to Forecast the Canadian Business Cycle is based on the fact that confidence (or sentiment) is one key indicators of economic momentum. The chapter assesses the contribution of confidence -or sentiment-data in predicting Canadian economic slowdowns. A probit framework is applied to an indicator on the status of the Canadian business cycle produced by the OECD. Explanatory variables include all available Canadian data on sentiment (which arise from four different surveys) as well as various macroeconomic and financial data. Sentiment data are introduced either as individual variables, as simple averages (such as confidence indices) and as confidence factors extracted, via principal components’ decomposition, from a larger dataset in which all available sentiment data have been collected. Our findings indicate that the full potential of sentiment data for forecasting future business cycles in Canada is attained when all data are used through the use of factor models. The third chapter uses dynamic factor models to highlight the contribution of the information contained in confidence survey data (either in Canadian or International surveys) for forecasting the Canadian economic activity. This chapter entitled Forecasting with Many Predictors: How Useful are National and International Confidence Data? is based on the fact that in a data-rich environment, information may become redundant so that a selection of forecasting determinants based on the quality of information is required. The chapter investigates whether in such an environment; confidence data can constitute a major determinant of economic activity forecasting. To do so, a targeted dynamic factor model is used to evaluate the performance of national and international confidence survey data in predicting Canadian GDP growth. We first examine the relationship between Canadian GDP and confidence and assess whether Canadian and international (US) improve forecasting accuracy after controlling for classical predictors. We next consider dis-aggregated confidence survey data in a data-rich environment (i.e. containing more than a thousand macroeconomic and financial series) and assess their information content in excess of that contained in macroeconomic and financial variables. Throughout, we investigate the predictive power of confidence data by producing GDP forecasts with dynamic factor models where the factors are derived with and without confidence data. We find that forecasting ability is consistently improved by considering information from national confidence data; by contrast, the international counterpart are helpful only when combined in the same set with national confidence. Moreover most relevant gains in the forecast performance come in short-horizon (up to three-quarters-ahead).

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
This thesis consists of three chapters on households' consumption. In the first chapter we study the canonical consumption-savings income-fluctuations problem with incomplete markets and show theoretically how to recover households' preferences and beliefs from their consumption and savings decisions. The main innovation is to show how to use the transitory component of income as an instrument that shifts current consumption without changing beliefs about future stochastic changes in consumption. As such, the transitory component of income, affects consumption growth through an intertemporal smoothing motive with no immediate effect on precautionary savings. With the precautionary motive neutralized, comparing changes in consumption and savings in response to temporary shocks allows us to identify the curvature of marginal utility: when savings respond more than consumption to transitory changes in income, the relative prudence is higher.
Additionally, the transitory component makes it possible to identify an effective discount rate, which in turns makes it possible to control the degree of households' impatience. The curvature of marginal utility and the effective discount rate are sufficient to understand how preferences restrict consumption choices through the Euler equation. To then recover beliefs, we assume that beliefs are independent of exogenous changes in assets. This gives us an additional instrument to identify beliefs since the belief system then has to be consistent with the implied savings patterns as assets vary. These two instruments allows us to non parametrically recover preferences and beliefs in a very general framework: we can accommodate multiple consumption items (both durable and non-durable), multiple assets (liquid and illiquid, risky or not), habits, endogenous labor supply and so on. The second chapter builds on the first.
We investigate empirically, in data from the PSID and the SIPP, how households' expectations deviate from rationality. Our estimation shows that households are overconfident and overoptimistic. The main source of overconfidence is that households underestimate the frequency of shocks and their optimism is driven by an underappreciation of negative shocks. However, these biases are not homogeneous in the population: they are amplified for lower income households while higher income households' perceptions are closer to rational expectations. These results explain not only the quantitative magnitude of undersaving and overreaction to income shocks, but also why higher income households accumulate disproportionately more wealth. We then explore how these beliefs affect the design of unemployment insurance and the transmission of countercyclical income risk to aggregate demand.
In the third chapter, written with Xavier Jaravel, we investigate how to design optimal income redistribution policies when the price of goods is depends on the size of the corresponding markets and different households consume different goods. We introduce Increasing Returns to Scale (IRS) and heterogeneous spending patterns (non-homothetic preferences) into the canonical tax problem of Mirrlees. In this environment, any change in tax policy induces a change in labor supply, hence a change in market size, which translates endogenously into a change in productivity; this productivity response affects consumer prices and sets off another round of labor supply changes, market size changes, productivity changes, further labor supply changes, and so on. We show theoretically how to characterize these general equilibrium effects and we quantify their importance for the optimal tax schedule.
The calibrated model matches empirical evidence on IRS as well as the tax schedule, earnings distribution and spending patterns observed in the United States. We establish three main results: (1) the optimal average tax rate is substantially lower on average, falling from about 45% under Constant Return to Scale (CRS) to about 35% with IRS (because IRS increase the efficiency cost of taxation); (2) with IRS and homothetic utility, optimal marginal tax rates are much less progressive than under CRS, and they become regressive above the 65th percentile of the income distribution (because IRS increase the efficiency cost of taxation relatively more for the rich); (3) with IRS and non-homothetic utility, optimal marginal tax rates become more progressive (intuitively, the planner internalizes that the productivity increase that could result from a tax break to the rich has low social value if the rich spend their marginal dollar on products that the poor do not consume much of).
These findings indicate the importance of endogenous productivity and non-homotheticities for optimal taxation.
by Alan Olivi.
Ph. D.
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics

Thesis advisor: Susanto Basu
Thesis advisor: Ryan Chahrour
This dissertation consists of three independent chapters analyzing the sources of business cycles and the role of monetary policy. Taking both closed- and open-economy perspectives, I study the importance of expectations for the empirical identification of economic and policy shocks, the nature of business cycle fluctuations, and the optimal conduct of monetary policy. The first chapter is titled ``International Spillovers and the Exchange Rate Channel of Monetary Policy,'' and is joint work with Vito Cormun. Motivated by the observation that exchange rate fluctuations largely influence small open economies, we propose a novel approach to separately identify the effects of domestic and external shocks on exchange rates and other macroeconomic variables, thereby uncovering a set of new empirical findings. A first finding is that external shocks account for most of exchange rate fluctuations. Relatedly, the bulk of external shocks is strongly correlated with measures of global risk aversion and uncertainty (e.g. the VIX), and a country’s net foreign asset position largely explains the exposure of its exchange rate to external disturbances. A second finding is that domestic and external disturbances generate very different comovement patterns between interest rates and exchange rates. In particular, unlike domestic shocks, external shocks are associated with large and significant deviations from uncovered interest parity. As a result, an econometrician that fails to properly distinguish between sources of exchange rate fluctuations is bound to obtain puzzling estimates of the exchange rate effects of domestic monetary policy shocks. These empirical findings have profound implications for models of small open economy and exchange rate determination. In particular, they favor theories in which exchange rates are jointly determined by the risk-bearing capacity in financial markets as well as the extent of a country’s financial imbalances. For this reason, we develop a model of the international financial sector that satisfies these features, and embed it in an otherwise standard general equilibrium two-country small open economy model. The key mechanism of the model consists of risk averse traders in the foreign exchange markets that require a premium to hold the currency risk of the small open economy. We show that the proposed model is able to reproduce all the empirical findings documented in the empirical analysis, including the cross-country differences in exposure to external shocks, the role of a country’s net foreign asset position, the different responses of interest rates, exchange rates, and currency excess returns across different shocks, as well as the emergence and resolution of the so-called exchange rate response puzzle across different identification approaches. The second chapter is titled ``Should Central Banks Target Investment Prices?'' and is joint work with Susanto Basu. The question posed in the title is motivated by the observation that central banks nearly always state explicit or implicit inflation targets in terms of consumer price inflation. To address the question, we develop an otherwise standard dynamic general equilibrium model with two production sectors. One sector produces consumption goods, while the other produces investment goods. In this context, we show that if there are nominal rigidities in the pricing of both consumption and investment goods and if the shocks to the two sectors are not identical, then monetary policy faces a tradeoff between targeting consumption price inflation and investment price inflation. In a model calibrated to replicate the estimated processes of sectoral total factor productivities as well as a set of unconditional business cycle moments, ignoring investment prices typically leads to substantial welfare losses because the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in investment is much higher than in consumption. Based on the model's predictions, we argue that a shift in monetary policy to targeting a weighted average of consumer and investment price inflation may produce significant welfare gains, although this would constitute a major change in current central banking practice. The third chapter is titled ``Information Acquisition and Self-Fulfilling Business Cycles,'' and is sole-authored work. To study the implications of imperfect information on economic fluctuations, I develop an otherwise standard Real Business Cycle model with endogenous information acquisition, which generates countecyclical firm-level uncertainty and endogenously procyclical productivity, as empirically documented in the literature. The main contribution of this chapter is the observation that this model displays aggregate increasing returns to scale and, potentially, an indeterminate dynamic equilibrium. In fact, an aggregate representation of the model is observationally equivalent to earlier theories of endogenous fluctuations based on increasing returns to scale, but its microeconomic foundations are consistent with empirically observed firm-level returns to scale. In a model calibrated to replicate a set of moments of the empirical distribution of firm-level productivity, self-fulfilling fluctuations are possible. In addition, a Bayesian estimation of the model suggests that non-fundamental shocks explain a significant fraction of aggregate fluctuations
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2010.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-220).
This dissertation consists of four chapters analyzing the effects of heterogeneous and asymmetric information in macroeconomic and financial settings, with an emphasis on short-run fluctuations. Within these chapters, I study the implications these informational frictions may have for the behavior of firms and financial institutions over the business cycle and during crises episodes. The first chapter examines how collateral constraints on firm-level investment introduce a powerful two-way feedback between the financial market and the real economy. On one hand, real economic activity forms the basis for asset dividends. On the other hand, asset prices affect collateral value, which in turn determines the ability of firms to invest. In this chapter I show how this two-way feedback can generate significant expectations-driven fluctuations in asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes when information is dispersed. In particular, I study the implications of this two-way feedback within a micro-founded business-cycle economy in which agents are imperfectly, and heterogeneously, informed about the underlying economic fundamentals. I then show how tighter collateral constraints mitigate the impact of productivity shocks on equilibrium output and asset prices, but amplify the impact of "noise", by which I mean common errors in expectations. Noise can thus be an important source of asset-price volatility and business-cycle fluctuations when collateral constraints are tight. The second chapter is based on joint work with George-Marios Angeletos. In this chapter we investigate a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and-potentially-shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the response of macroeconomic outcomes to such shocks; (ii) induce a negative short-run response of employment to productivity shocks; (iii) imply that productivity shocks explain only a small fraction of high-frequency fluctuations; (iv) contribute to significant noise in the business cycle; (v) formalize a certain type of demand shocks within an RBC economy; and (vi) generate cyclical variation in observed Solow residuals and labor wedges. Importantly, none of these properties requires significant uncertainty about the underlying fundamentals: they rest on the heterogeneity of information and the strength of trade linkages in the economy, not the level of uncertainty. Finally, none of these properties are symptoms of inefficiency: apart from undoing monopoly distortions or providing the agents with more information, no policy intervention can improve upon the equilibrium allocations. The third chapter is also based on joint work with George-Marios Angeletos. This chapter investigates how incomplete information affects the response of prices to nominal shocks. Our baseline model is a variant of the Calvo model in which firms observe the underlying nominal shocks with noise. In this model, the response of prices is pinned down by three parameters: the precision of available information about the nominal shock; the frequency of price adjustment; and the degree of strategic complementarity in pricing decisions. This result synthesizes the broader lessons of the pertinent literature. However, this synthesis provides only a partial view of the role of incomplete information: once one allows for more general information structures than those used in previous work, one cannot quantify the degree of price inertia without additional information about the dynamics of higher-order beliefs, or of the agents' forecasts of inflation. We highlight this with three extensions of our baseline model, all of which break the tight connection between the precision of information and higher-order beliefs featured in previous work. Finally, the fourth chapter studies how predatory trading affects the ability of banks and large trading institutions to raise capital in times of temporary financial distress in an environment in which traders are asymmetrically informed about each others' balance sheets. Predatory trading is a strategy in which a trader can profit by trading against another trader's position, driving an otherwise solvent but distressed trader into insolvency. The predator, however, must be sufficiently informed of the distressed trader's balance sheet in order to exploit this position. I find that when a distressed trader is more informed than other traders about his own balances, searching for extra capital from lenders can become a signal of financial need, thereby opening the door for predatory trading and possible insolvency. Thus, a trader who would otherwise seek to recapitalize is reluctant to search for extra capital in the presence of potential predators. Predatory trading may therefore make it exceedingly difficult for banks and financial institutions to raise credit in times of temporary financial distress.
by Jennifer La'O.
Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references.
(cont.) the release of information until the long-term results of the firm are realized. In equilibrium, when the belief about the aggregate state is high, managers will be given short-term incentives, delaying the release of information. When the belief about the aggregate state is low, long-term incentives will be prevalent and information will be released without delay. This produces asymmetric learning dynamics for the economy, with gradual booms and rapid recessions. In a boom the belief about the aggregate state increases, information is pushed off into the future, and learning is slow. In a recession the belief is falling, triggering a switch to long-term incentives, that brings forward the release of information and accelerates learning. Chapter 2 presents a model of corporate misreporting in an environment where investors have heterogeneous beliefs and short sale constraints. The disagreement between investors provides a motive for agents who start a firm to limit the amount of information which it releases to the public so as to sponsor speculation over its value. This incentive to limit information is stronger when the heterogeneity of beliefs among investors is stronger. Investors also learn about a firm's expected profitability from the information released by other firms in the industry. I show that this creates a strategic complementarily in the precision of information released by each firm. This can give rise to multiple equilibria: one in which all firms release precise reports and one in which their reports are inaccurate ...
This thesis consists of three essays at the intersection of macroeconomics, corporate finance, and social learning. The underlying theme which links these three chapters is the study of private incentives to gather and release information and their impact upon the way society learns as a whole. Chapters 1 and 2 focus upon the incentives within a firm to distort the way a firm's performance is perceived publicly. Chapter 1 focuses upon the case of a manager whose incentives encourage her to take actions which distort the observed performance of the firm. In that context the firm's owners tolerate distortions so as to gain from high powered incentives. In chapter 2 I argue that the owners of a firm may have it in their interest to distort the information a firm releases so as to create uncertainty and thereby sponsor speculation on the value of the firm. Chapter 3 considers a scenario where an intelligence agency relies upon the information provided by citizens not under their direct control. A common feature of each chapter is that private decisions about information release are made without considering their full social value. Turning to specifics, Chapter 1 presents a theory of gradual booms and rapid recessions that is motivated by the experience of the US economy over the last decade. The dynamics of the economy are driven by the speed at which agents learn about the unobserved aggregate state. Agents learn from the observed performance of firms. Each firm is controlled by a manager whose compensation is based upon the observed performance of their firm. If a manager is given short-term incentives, she will try to hide weak short-term performance. This makes the short-term performance of a firm less informative for the aggregate state, delaying
by Andrew C.P. Hertzberg.
Ph.D.

Defence date: 21 May 2021
Examining Board: Professor Evi Pappa (Universidad Carlos III Madrid); Professor Leonardo Melosi (European University Institute and Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago); Professor Galo Nuño (Bank of Spain); Professor Andrea Prestipino (Federal Reserve Board)
This thesis investigates topics in macroeconomics with nonlinear dynamics as their inherent feature. It aims to further the understanding of the connection between the financial sector and economic fluctuations, challenges of monetary policy in a low interest rate environment and how to mitigate the macroeconomic consequences of a pandemic. The first chapter investigates the connection between the shadow banking sector and the vulnerability of the economy to a financial crisis. Motivated by the build-up of shadow bank leverage prior to the Great Recession, I develop a nonlinear macroeconomic model that features excessive leverage accumulation and show how this can cause a run. Introducing risk-shifting incentives to account for fluctuations in shadow bank leverage, I use the model to illustrate that extensive leverage makes the shadow banking system runnable, thereby raising the vulnerability of the economy to future financial crises. The model is taken to U.S. data with the objective of estimating the probability of a run in the years preceding the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The second chapter, joint with Francesco Bianchi and Leonardo Melosi, is motivated by the observation that the Federal Reserve Bank has been systematically undershooting its 2% inflation target in the past twenty years. This deflationary bias is a predictable consequence of the current symmetric monetary policy strategy that fails to recognize the risk of encountering the zero-lower-bound. An asymmetric rule according to which the central bank responds less aggressively to above-target inflation corrects the bias, improves welfare, and reduces the risk of deflationary spirals. The third chapter, joint with Matthieu Darracq Paries and Christoffer Kok, analyses the risk that an intended monetary policy accommodation might actually have contractionary effects in a low interest rate environment. We demonstrate that the risk of hitting the rate at which the effect reverses depends on the capitalization of the banking sector by using a nonlinear macroeconomic model. The framework suggests that the reversal interest rate is around −1% p.a. in the Euro Area. We show that the possibility of the reversal interest rate creates a novel motive for macroprudential policy. The fourth chapter, joint with Leonardo Melosi, studies contact tracing in a new macro-epidemiological model with asymptomatic spreaders. Contact tracing is a testing strategy that aims to reconstruct the infection chain of newly symptomatic agents. We show that contact tracing may be insufficient to stem the spread of infections because agents fail to internalize that their decisions increase the number of traceable contacts to be tested in the future. We provide theoretical underpinnings to the risk of becoming infected in macro-epidemiological models.
-- Part 1 Financial Crises and Shadow Banks: A Quantitative Analysis -- 1.1 Introduction -- 1.2 Model -- 1.3 Multiple Equilibria, Bank Runs and Leverage -- 1.4 Model Evaluation -- 1.5 Quantitative Assessment: Financial Crisis of 2007 - 2009 -- 1.6 Leverage Tax -- 1.7 Reduced Form Evidence: Quantile Regressions -- 1.8 Conclusion -- Part 2 Hitting the Elusive Inflation Target -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 The Model -- 2.3 Deflationary Bias and Deflationary Spirals -- 2.4 ZLB Risk and Macroeconomic Biases -- 2.5 The Asymmetric Rule -- 2.6 Target Ranges -- 2.7 Conclusions -- Part 3 Reversal Interest Rate and Macroprudential Policy -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 The Model -- 3.3 Calibration -- 3.4 Non-Linear Transmission, Reversal Interest Rate and Optimal Lower Bound -- 3.5 Macroprudential Policy -- 3.6 Conclusion -- Part 4 Pandemic Recessions and Contact Tracing -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 The Model -- 4.3 Contact Tracing and Testing -- 4.4 Model Solution and Calibration -- 4.5 Quantitative Analysis of Contact Tracing -- 4.6 Extensions -- 4.7 Concluding Remarks -- References -- A Appendix to Chapter 1 -- B Appendix to Chapter 2 -- C Appendix to Chapter 3 -- D Appendix to Chapter 4
Chapter 1 ‘Financial Crises and Shadow Banks: A Quantitative Analysis' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as EUI ECO 2021/02
Chapter 2 ‘Hitting the Elusive Inflation Target' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as NBER Working Paper series, 2019/26279
Chapter 3 ‘Reversal Interest Rate and Macroprudential Policy' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as ECB Working Paper;, 2020/2487.
Chapter 4 'Pandemic Recessions and Contact Tracing' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as CEPR Discussion Paper, 2020/DP15482.

Chapter 1: We propose an integral correction mechanism to model real exchange rate dynamics. In estimation, we also allow a Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect on real exchange rate long-run equilibrium. Using data from 19 OECD countries, we find the integral correction mechanism fitting in-sample data significantly better than the popular smooth transition autoregression model. The special dynamics of the integral correction mechanism help explain the PPP puzzle by distinguishing mean-reversion speeds in the long- and short- run. However, the integral correction mechanism shows a significant out-of-sample forecast gain over the random walk in only few cases. Though the gain is robust across forecast horizons and quite large at long horizons. Chapter 2: This chapter evaluates the ability of a standard IRBC model augmented with an input adjustment cost of imported goods to explain different aspects of the real exchange rate like the standard deviation, the autocorrelation function, the spectrum and the integral correction mechanism. I find that the simple IRBC model with an appropriate calibration can well capture all features of the real exchange rate. The input adjustment cost plays the key role. As compared to the standard model, it implies a reversed impulse response of the real exchange rate with a fast speed going back to steady state and introduces a long-run cyclical movement in most macroeconomic variables. I find that this particular impulse response helps explain the PPP puzzle. Chapter 3: I study optimal unconventional monetary policy under commitment in a two-country model where domestic policy entails larger spillovers to foreign countries. Equity injections into financial intermediaries turn out to be more efficient than discount window lending and the large-scale asset purchases that have been employed in many countries. Due to precautionary effects of future crises, a central bank should exit from its policy more slowly than the speed of deleveraging in the financial sector. The optimal policy can be changed considerably if cross-country policy cooperation is not imposed. In this case, interventions tend to be too strong in one country but too weak in the other. Gains from cooperation become positive if using unconventional monetary policy is costly enough, then correlates positively with the cost. Chapter 4: I consider the implementation of optimal unconventional monetary policy outlined in chapter 3. I find the Ramsey policy characterised by a simple rules responding to gaps in asset prices. However, it requires knowledge of asset prices that would be realized in a world free of financial friction so cannot be used to guide unconventional monetary policy in practice. The best practical simple rule responds to credit spread with inertia.

This dissertation focuses on learning and expectations formation in Macroeconomics and Finance and the role of information production in shaping macroeconomic fluctuations. The first chapter provides a theory of information production to explain two features of modern business cycles. In my theory information is produced along two dimensions, a pro-cyclical quantitative margin and a counter-cyclical qualitative margin, that generates both slow recoveries and episodes of ”rational exuberance” where optimistic booms tend to end in crises. The second chapter provides supporting evidence for the proposed cyclical variation in private information production using term loan data in the United States. Finally, the third chapter documents biases in terms of over-optimism and overconfidence in forecasts of real GDP growth from the survey of professional forecasters in the United States.
Esta tesis estudia la formación de expectativas macroeconómicas y financieras y en el rol que tiene la producción de información sobre las fluctuaciones económicas. El primer capítulo desarrolla una teoría de la producción de información que genera una economía con recuperaciones lentas y ”booms” económicos que terminan en crisis económicas. En mi teoría, la información es producida a través de dos mecanismos, la cantidad de información producida es pro-cíclica y la calidad de la información es anti-cíclica. El segundo capitulo presenta evidencia usando datos de préstamos a plazos en EE.UU. para medir la producción de información privada durante el ciclo económico. Finalmente, el tercer capítulo documenta sesgos en términos de exceso de optimismo y exceso de confianza en las predicciones de crecimiento del PBI real usando la ”Survey of Professional Forecasters” en el Estados Unidos.