Essays in Macroeconomics and Financial Economics
| Author | : Edison Guozhu Yu |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : |
| Release | : 2013 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay, entitled "Dynamic Market Participation and Endogenous Information Aggregation", studies information aggregation in financial markets with recurrent investor exit and entry. The paper considers a dynamic general equilibrium model of asset trading with private information and collateral constraints. Investors differ in their aversion to Knightian uncertainty: when uncertainty is high, some investors exit the market. Since exiting investors' information is not fully revealed by prices, conditional return volatility and risk premia both increase. I use data on institutional investors' holdings of individual stocks to show that investor exit rates indeed comove with return volatility and help forecast it. The model also implies that exit is more likely when wealth is more concentrated in the hands of less uncertainty averse investors. The model thus predicts more exit toward the end of a long boom, as seen in the data. Moreover, economies with looser collateral constraints should see more volatility due to exit and partial revelation. The second essay, entitled "The (Un)importance of Mobility in the Great Recession", is based on a paper co-authored with Siddharth Kothari and Itay Saporta-Eksten. Unemployment during and after the Great Recession has been persistently high. One concern is that the housing bust reduced mobility and prevented workers from moving for jobs. The paper characterizes flows out of unemployment that are related to mobility to construct an upper bound on the effect of mobility on unemployment between 2007 and 2012. The effect of mobility is always small: Using pre-recession mobility rates, decreased mobility can account for only an 11 basis points increase in the unemployment rate over the period. Using dynamics of renter mobility in this period to calculate homeowner counterfactual mobility, can account for an 8 basis points increase. Using the highest mobility rate observed in the data, reduced mobility accounts for only a 34 basis points increase in the unemployment rate. The third essay, entitled "Long-term Bonds in a Housing Model", looks into a housing model where mortgages are modeled as a long-term bond. Most house purchases in the US are financed through a mortgage with maturity between 15 and 30 years. This essay studies house price dynamics when modeling mortgages as long-term bonds instead of the more standard one-period bond. With this new feature in the model, results show that the equilibrium price-rent ratio and mortgages borrowing are much less sensitive to changes in the interest rates. In addition, the model can generate negative equity, which matches the presence of negative equity in the housing market downturn in data.
