Essays on Macroeconomics and Firm Dynamics

Essays on Macroeconomics and Firm Dynamics
Author: Lei Zhang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation contains three essays at the interaction between macroeconomics and the financial market, with an emphasis on macroeconomic implications of heterogeneous firms under financial frictions. My dissertation explores the relationships among financial market friction, firms' entry and exit behaviors, and job reallocation over the business cycle. Chapter 1 examines the macroeconomic effects of financial leverage and firms' endogenous entry and exit on job reallocation over the business cycle. Financial leverage and the extensive margin are the keys to explain job reallocation at both the firm-level and the aggregate level. I build a general equilibrium industry dynamics model with endogenous entry and exit, a frictional labor market, and borrowing constraints. The model provides a novel theory that financially constrained firms adjust employment more often. I characterize an analytical solution to the wage bargaining problem between a leveraged firm and workers. Higher financial leverage allows constrained firms to bargain for lower wages, but also induces higher default risks. In the model, firms adopt (S,s) employment decision rules. Because the entry and exit firms are more likely to be borrowing constrained, a negative shock affects the inaction regions of the entry and exit firms more than that of the incumbents. In the simulated model, the extensive margin explains 36% of the job reallocation volatility, which is very close to the data and is quantitatively significant. Chapter 2 investigates firms' financial behaviors and size distributions over the business cycle. We propose a general equilibrium industry dynamics model of firms' capital structure and entry and exit behaviors. The financial market frictions capture both the age dependence and size dependence of firms' size distributions. When we add the aggregate shocks to the model, it can account for the business cycle patterns of firm dynamics: 1) entry is more procyclical than exit; 2) debt is procyclical, and equity issuance is countercyclical; and 3) the cyclicalities of debt and equity issuance are negatively correlated with firm size and age. Chapter 3 studies the equilibrium pricing of complex securities in segmented markets by risk-averse expert investors who are subject to asset-specific risk. Investor expertise varies, and the investment technology of investors with more expertise is subject to less asset-specific risk. Expert demand lowers equilibrium required returns, reducing participation, and leading to endogenously segmented markets. Amongst participants, portfolio decisions and realized returns determine the joint distribution of financial expertise and financial wealth. This distribution, along with participation, then determines market-level risk bearing capacity. We show that more complex assets deliver higher equilibrium returns to expert participants. Moreover, we explain why complex assets can have lower overall participation despite higher market-level alphas and Sharpe ratios. Finally, we show how complexity affects the size distribution of complex asset investors in a way that is consistent with the size distribution of hedge funds.

Three Essays in Monetary Economics

Three Essays in Monetary Economics
Author: Qiao Zhang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

In this dissertation, my research aims at dwelling on the questions, at understanding and explaining -- as a follow of current strand of literature on financial frictions -- the mechanisms that allowed the imperfect and perfect credit intermediation to affect the dynamics of economy and the transmission of monetary policy, and providing a new theoretical formulation for evaluating the unconventional monetary policy. To do this, I first considered the impact of financial intermediation on the analysis of central bank transparency issue (Chapter 2). ln Chapter 3, I focused on the role played by the imperfect financial intermediation/financial frictions in the transmission of shocks : through which mechanisms, do the presence of balance-sheet constraint financial intermediaries affect the effect of shocks on the macroeconomy? Finally, in Chapter 4, 1 construct an theoreticalmodel to analyze an important issue which have net been carried out in existing literature: the transmission mechanism of the central bank's large-scale purchase of mortgage-backed securities. ln this chapter, I first simulated a financial crisis to see if the model is able to replicate some of the most important stylized facts of the Great Recession. Then, basing on the simulated crisis, I examine the efficacy and transmission mechanism of large scale purchases of MBS through comparing these purchases to the purchases of corporate bonds. This experiment is conducted in two credit market configurations, i.e., a partially and a totally segmented credit market. The latter case of market condition is considered by many economists as main obstacle that impedes the nominal functioning of the financial markets. ln this work, we have obtained rich and important findings for guiding the use of unconventional monetary policy. The following parts briefly present the findinqs of the thesis.