Essays on Efficacy of Macroeconomic Policies

Essays on Efficacy of Macroeconomic Policies
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN: 9781321540383

This research analyzes efficacy of the macroeconomic policies and the role of policymakers to deal with a recessionary case. In particular, it focuses on the instruments policymakers have in hand to stimulate the economic activity. It does the quantitative multiplier analysis for economies with various forms of financial market imperfections to provide a greater degree of realism into macroeconomic modeling. The first chapter analyzes efficacy of a fiscal policy tool, a tax cut in particular, in a liquidity trap scenario where monetary expansion is ineffective. It basically answers a question, as to when the zero-lower-bound is binding and the conventional monetary policy is not working, whether the discretionary fiscal policy is really ineffective as has recently been argued. The second chapter focuses on unconventional monetary policy in a closed economy and researches a question as to whether certain assumptions regarding constraints and rigidities amplify or mitigate the macroeconomic or real effects of unconventional monetary policy. The third chapter examines the macroeconomic effects of a social security reform. It analyzes contributions from different forms of changes; quantifies the macroeconomic implications of various reforms. Scenario analysis reveal positive effects for labor supply, capital stock and output to the reform implemented.

Essays on Macroeconomics of Monetary and Fiscal Policies

Essays on Macroeconomics of Monetary and Fiscal Policies
Author: Yu She
Publisher:
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

My thesis contains three chapters which focus heavily on the macroeconomic policies. The first chapter focuses on the effectiveness of monetary policy on firms with different financial constraints. The second chapter addresses on how would the optimal tax policy change the evolution of inequality. The third chapter emphasizes on how to provide a proxy means testing from a welfare perspective to a transfer program. In the first chapter, I study the role of financial constraints in the effects of monetary policy on firm investments. I construct a quarterly textual measure of financial constraints from SEC filings using a deep learning model. It improves the prediction accuracy as compared to a Naive Bayes method by capturing the context information, such as grammatical structure and order of words. Firms classified as highly constrained are younger, smaller, have a higher liquidity ratio and higher leverage ratio. However, popular proxies of financial constraints often do not move monotonically with the level of financial constraints. Particularly for the liquidity ratio, it is high for both the least constrained firms, which have ample of cash, and the most constrained firms, which hoard cash due to precautionary saving motives and the high marginal cost of external capital. Using the constructed measure of financial constraints, the investments of financially constrained firms are persistently less responsive to monetary policy shocks due to high marginal cost of external funds. This implies that monetary policy might be less effective during crisis time due to a larger fraction of constrained firms. My results reconcile previous empirical findings and argue that the seemingly contrary conclusions are, to some extent, consistent with each other. In the second chapter, it intends to address on the question: how would the optimal taxes change the evolution of wealth inequality? This paper studies this question quantitatively under a standard incomplete market heterogeneous agent model. The benchmark model captures the wealth distribution and its evolution from 1967-2010. Optimal tax policy exercise considers an once-and-for-all tax reform at 1967 accounting for the time varying economic environment and transition dynamics. With a utilitarian social planner, the optimal linear comprehensive income tax leads to a higher level inequality in wealth where top 10\% and top 1\% gain at least 5\% more wealth shares at 2010 compared to benchmark. The optimal tax under a parameterized nonlinear tax function implies a highly progressive tax system which is also highly redistributive compared to the benchmark model. The wealth inequality in this case is increasing from 1960s to mid 1990s and then start to decline to its 1960s level or even lower. At 2010, top 10\% remains roughly their wealth holdings at their 1967 level while top 1\%, 0.1\% and 0.01\% wealth holding even decrease on average about 2\% compared to their low level at year 1967. In the last chapter, I propose a new proxy means testing method with minimizing welfare loss as the target instead of traditional targets such as minimizing consumption loss. In a simple economy with a utilitarian social planner, the welfare approach is equivalent to a weighted logistic regression with inverse consumption as weights. As a result, it focuses mainly on the exclusion error where poor are identified as non-poor and less weights on the inclusion error where non-poor are identified as poor. Using the socio-economic survey data in India in 2011, I compare the targeting performance of the welfare approach to other standard approaches in PMT. It shows that the welfare approach enjoys a lower exclusion error rate by sacrificing the inclusion error rate and does not out-perform the traditional method. It does, on the other hand, provide a welfare foundation for the poverty weighted least square method.

Essays on Efficiency and Coordination of Fiscal Policies in Interdependent Economies

Essays on Efficiency and Coordination of Fiscal Policies in Interdependent Economies
Author: Irem Zeyneloglu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

New open economy macroeconomics (NOEM) literature, initiated by Obstfeld-Rogoff (1995), offers a more rigourous setup for the analysis of macroeconomic policy with respect to Mundell-Fleming models. The perpective of deterministic general equilibrium NOEM models that emerged from Obstfeld-Rogoff (1995) has been extended by Obstfeld-Rogoff (2002) to a stochastic environment. The present dissertation aims to contribute to these two streams of research concerning fiscal policy analysis in the NOEM literature. The dissertation consists of a survey and four essays. The first two essays extend the deterministic setup Obstfeld-Rogoff (1995) by introducing imperfect financial integration and by relaxing the assumption of ricardian equivalence respectively. The third and fourth essays extend Obstfeld-Rogoff (2002) to analyze stabilization and cooperation gains from fiscal policy as well as the interactions between monetary and fiscal policy.

The Selected Essays of Assar Lindbeck: Macroeconomics and economic policy

The Selected Essays of Assar Lindbeck: Macroeconomics and economic policy
Author: Assar Lindbeck
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1993
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

The first volume in a two-volume set on macroeconomics, economic policy and the welfare state. This volume covers the development of the author's thought, illustrating how his experience of economic policy-making in Sweden has led him to form his current opinions.

Essays on Macroeconomic Policies and Household Heterogeneity

Essays on Macroeconomic Policies and Household Heterogeneity
Author: Gergő Motyovszki
Publisher:
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2021
Genre: Macroeconomics
ISBN:

This thesis is composed of three independent chapters, but all centered around the broader topic of how macroeconomic policies interact with various aspects of household heterogeneity. Monetary Policy and Inequality under Labor Market Frictions and Capital-Skill Complementarity We provide a new channel through which monetary policy has distributional consequences at business cycle frequencies. We show that an unexpected monetary easing increases labor income inequality between high and less-skilled workers. In particular, this effect is prominent in sectors intensive in less-skilled labor, that exhibit high degree of capital-skill complementarity (CSC) and are subject to matching inefficiencies. To rationalize these findings we build a New Keynesian DSGE model with asymmetric search and matching (SAM) frictions across the two types of workers and CSC in the production function. We show that CSC on its own introduces a dynamic demand amplification mechanism: the increase in high-skilled employment after a monetary expansion makes complementary capital more productive, encouraging a further rise in investment demand and creating a multiplier effect. SAM asymmetries magnify this channel. Monetary-Fiscal Interactions and Redistribution in Small Open Economies Ballooning public debts in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic can present monetary-fiscal policies with a dilemma if and when neutral real interest rates rise, which might arrive sooner in emerging markets: policymakers can stabilize debts either by relying on fiscal adjustments (AM-PF) or by tolerating higher inflation (PM-AF). The choice between these policy mixes affects the efficacy of the fiscal expansion already today and can interact with the distributive properties of the stimulus across heterogeneous households. To study this, I build a two agent New Keynesian (TANK) small open economy model with monetary-fiscal interactions. Targeting fiscal transfers more towards high-MPC agents increases the output multiplier of a fiscal stimulus, while raising the degree of deficitfinancing for these transfers also helps. However, precise targeting is much more important under the AM-PF regime than the question of financing, while the opposite is the case with a PM-AF policy mix: then deficit-spending is crucial for the size of the multiplier, and targeting matters less. Under the PM-AF regime fiscal stimulus entails a real exchange rate depreciation which might offset "import leakage" by stimulating net exports, if the share of hand-to-mouth households is low and trade is price elastic enough. Therefore, a PM-AF policy mix might break the Mundell-Fleming prediction that open economies have smaller fiscal multipliers relative to closed economies. Weak Wage Recovery and Precautionary Motives after a Credit Crunch During the economic recovery following the financial crisis many advanced economies saw subdued wage dynamics, in spite of falling unemployment and an increasingly tight labour market. We propose a mechanism which can account for this puzzle and work against usual aggregate demand channels. In a heterogeneous agent model with incomplete markets we endogenize uninsurable idiosyncratic risk through search-and-matching (SAM) frictions in the labour market. In this setting, apart from the usual precautionary saving behaviour, households can self-insure also by settling for lower wages in order to secure a job and thereby avoid becoming borrowing constrained. This channel is especially pronounced for asset-poor agents, already close to the constraint. We introduce a credit crunch into this framework modelled as a gradual tightening of the borrowing constraint (and utilizing a continuous time approach, known as HACT). The perfect foresight transition dynamics feature falling wages despite a tightening labour market and expanding employment. As households suddenly find themselves closer to the borrowing constraint, the increased precautionary motive drives them to accept lower wages in the bargaining process, while firms respond to this by posting more vacancies, leading to a tighter labour market and falling unemployment. If the household deleveraging pressure is persistent enough after the credit crunch, it can explain the weak wage recovery in spite of already stronger aggregate demand.

The Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy in Stimulating Economic Activity

The Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy in Stimulating Economic Activity
Author: Richard Hemming
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 62
Release: 2002-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The focus is on the size of fiscal multipliers, and on the possibility that multipliers can turn negative (i.e., that fiscal contractions can be expansionary). The paper concludes that fiscal multipliers are overwhelmingly positive but small. However, there is some evidence of negative fiscal multipliers.

Essays on the Macroeconomic Impact of Trade and Monetary Policy

Essays on the Macroeconomic Impact of Trade and Monetary Policy
Author: Milan Lisicky
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:

My thesis consists of three chapters. The aim of the first two chapters is to investigate the linkages between trade and the cross-country comovement and volatility of GDP growth, while the last chapter is an independent study on how the optimal design of monetary policy depends on the share of labour- and capital-intensive sectors. The first chapter develops a framework to study the effects of international trade on GDP comovement. Using a standard trade-theoretical approach, I first show how the comovement between any pair of countries is linked to shocks affecting both the two countries bilaterally and all other countries. Secondly, I use a calibrated version of the model to assess the importance of the bilateral channel relative to the role of linkages with all other countries. The second chapter investigates whether and how openness to trade may affect macroeconomic volatility. While greater openness provides a powerful channel for transmission of foreign disturbances, it also lowers the exposure to domestic shocks. My co-authors and I show that as long as the volatility of trading partners and covariance of shocks across countries are not too large, trade can act as a channel for the diversification of country-specific shocks and in that way contribute to lower volatility. The third chapter examines what is the optimal measure of inflation in a two-sector economy with nominal frictions, where sectors differ in labour intensity. I find that a welfare-oriented central bank should follow more closely the developments in the less labour-intensive sector. The source of this bias is traced back to a greater sensitivity of the marginal product of labour in that sector, so that output dispersion caused by nominal rigidities generates higher efficiency losses where labour is relatively less abundant.