Essays on Output and Consumption Volatility in Less Developed Economies PDF Download

Author: Miguel Cardoso
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Author: Anurag Singh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The third chapter looks at one of the key financial frictions in emerging and poor economies—the presence of credit constrained households—and the way they affect consumption-to-output volatility ratio in these countries. A higher than one ratio of consumption-to-output volatility in emerging and poor countries is at odds with the observation that emerging and poor countries are also the countries where a big fraction of consumers do not have access to financial services. This is because consumers with no access to financial services cannot smooth consumption and can only have a consumption volatility to output volatility ratio of one. Therefore, in the presence of credit constrained households, the consumption volatility to output volatility ratio in the theoretical models should move closer to one rather than going up and away from one. This chapter, therefore, incorporates credit constrained households in an augmented real business cycle (RBC) model to study their effect on economic fluctuations in a set on 75 countries.

Author: John Albert Simon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Author: Hongyan Zhao
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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This dissertation consists of three essays in macroeconomics. The first one essay discusses the reasons of Chinese huge foreign reserves holdings. It contributes to the literature of sudden stops, precautionary saving and foreign assets holdings. In the second essay, I study the price volatility of commodities and manufactured goods. I measure the price volatility of each individual goods but not on the aggregated level and therefore the results complete the related study. The third essay explores the correlation between the relative volatility of output to money stock and financial development. It extends the application of financial accelerator model. In the first essay, I address the question of China's extraordinary economic growth during the last decade and huge magnitude of foreign reserves holdings. The coexistence of fast economic growth and net capital outflow presents a puzzle to the conventional wisdom that developing countries should borrow from abroad. This paper develops a two-sector DSGE model to quantify the contribution of precautionary saving motivation against economic sudden stops. The risk of sudden stops comes from the lagged financial reforms in China, in which banks continue to support inefficient state-owned enterprises, while the more productive private firms are subject to strong discrimination in credit market, and face the endogenous collateral constraints. When the private sector is small, the impact on aggregate output of binding credit constraints is limited. However, as the output share of private sector increases, the negative effect of financial frictions on private firms grows, and it is more likely to trigger a nation-wide economic sudden stop. Thus, the precautionary savings rise and the demand for foreign assets also increases. Our calibration exercise based on Chinese macro data shows that 25 percent of foreign reserves can be accounted for by the rising probability of sudden stops. The second essay studies the relative volatility of commodity prices with a large dataset of monthly prices observed in international trade data from the United States over the period 2002 to 2011. The conventional wisdom in academia and policy circles is that primary commodity prices are more volatile than those of manufactured products, although most existing studies do not measure the relative volatility of prices of individual goods or commodities. The literature tends to focus on trends in the evolution and volatility of ratios of price indexes composed of multiple commodities and products. This approach can be misleading. The evidence presented here suggests that, on average, prices of individual primary commodities are less volatile than those of individual manufactured goods. Furthermore, robustness tests suggest that these results are not likely to be due to alternative product classification choices, differences in product exit rates, measurement errors in the trade data, or the level of aggregation of the trade data. Hence the explanation must be found in the realm of economics, rather than measurement. However, the challenges of managing terms of trade volatility in developing countries with concentrated export baskets remain. The third essay tries to understand why the relative volatility of nominal output to money stock is negatively related to countries' financial development level from cross-country evidence. In the paper I modify Bernanke et al. (1999)'s financial accelerator model by introducing the classic money demand function. The calibration to US data shows that the model is able to replicate this empirical pattern quite well. Given the same monetary shocks, countries with poorer financial system have larger output volatility due to the stronger effect of financial accelerator mechanism.

Author: Gunnar Tersman
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1451946139
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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This paper studies the volatility of consumption relative to output in the context of a simple general equilibrium model of a small open economy subject to exogenous shocks in productivity. With infinite horizons and exogenous relative prices, the model generates variance estimates that are well above what can be observed in empirical data. While finite horizons and endogenous terms of trade reduce the volatility of consumption, the model fails to generate sufficient serial correlation with respect to the consumption growth rate. If the household’s decision problem is modified to take into account durability and adjustment costs, the model does well on both dimensions.

Author: Hüseyin Murat Özbilgin
Publisher: ProQuest
ISBN: 9780549268215
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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The first essay explores the implications of limited participation in financial markets on a standard small open economy business cycle model. The limited participation models developed therein are used to inspect the effects of financial development and integration on macroeconomic volatility. Numerical analyses indicate that, under a standard calibration, limited participation models can be consistent with the empirical finding that financial development and integration are associated with higher consumption and output volatility.

Author: Mr.Ayhan Kose
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1451875878
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 39

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This paper analyzes the evolution of volatility and cross-country comovement in output, consumption, and investment fluctuations using two distinct datasets. The results suggest that there has been a significant decline in the volatility of business cycle fluctuations and a slight increase in the degree of cyclical comovement among industrialized countries over time. However, for emerging market economies, financial globalization appears to have been associated, on average, with an increase in macroeconomic volatility as well as declines in the degree of comovement of output and consumption growth with their corresponding world aggregates.

Author: Claudio E. Raddatz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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This thesis consists of three empirical essays on different aspects of macroeconomic volatility. The first essay provides evidence of a causal and economically important relation between financial development and macroeconomic volatility by looking at the effect of financial development in the volatility of sectors with different liquidity needs. The results show that sectors with high liquidity needs are relatively more volatile in financially underdeveloped countries. These sectoral effects of financial underdevelopment can significantly increase macroeconomic volatility, despite the fact that financial underdevelopment also induces countries to move away from sectors with high liquidity needs. The second essay explores the causes of the decline in U.S. manufacturing volatility during the last two decades. The essay presents and estimates a model that decomposes the changes in the volatilities of manufacturing sectors among the effects of output composition, aggregate shocks, sectoral shocks, and sectoral linkages. The results show that changes in the volatility of aggregate shocks and their impact across sectors account for the most of the decline in U.S. manufacturing volatility. A smaller role is played by changes in the volatility of sectoral shocks and in the intensity of sectoral linkages. The third essay analyzes both the sectoral effects of monetary policy and the role that monetary policy plays in the transmission of sectoral shocks. Our methodology is applied to the case of the U.S., finding considerable differences in the response of different sectors to monetary policy. The results also show that monetary policy is an important source of sectoral transfers: a shock to Equipment-and-Software Investment, naturally identified with the high-tech crises, induces a monetary policy response that generates a temporary boom in Residential Investment and Consumption of Durables, but which has almost no effect on the high-tech sector.

Author: Luis Gonzalo Llosa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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In these essays, I examine (i) the role of terms of trade in emerging countries and (ii) economic efficiency under endogenous information. The first chapter documents a negative relationship between the terms of trade - defined as the ratio of imports to the price of exports - and various macroeconomic variables such as output, consumption, investment and total factor productivity (TFP) in emerging economies. The second part of this chapter presents a small open economy business cycles model featuring intermediate imported inputs, monopolistic competition and input-output linkages. A calibrated version of the model reproduces the empirical facts documented in the first part. In particular, the model replicates the negative link between the terms of trade and TFP, providing an explanation to a long-standing puzzle in the business cycle literature. In addition, I show how terms of trade shocks help to increase the volatility of consumption above the volatility of output. The second and third chapters, which are part of an ongoing work with Venky Venkateswaran, examine economic efficiency under costly private information. In the second chapter, my co-author and I study the efficiency of equilibrium outcomes in models where monopolistically competitive firms acquire costly information about aggregate fundamentals before making pricing or quantity decisions. Using this framework we show that market power reduces the private value of information relative to its social value, causing too little investment in learning and inefficient cyclical fluctuations. Importantly, this is true even in an environment where the ex-post response to information is socially optimal, which is the case when firms choose labor input under uncertainty about aggregate productivity. When firms set nominal prices, however, their actions exhibit a inefficiently high sensitivity to their private signals. The combination of this inefficiency in information use and market power makes the overall direction of the inefficiency in information acquisition ambiguous. In terms of policy, we show that the standard full information response to market power-related distortions can reduce welfare under endogenous uncertainty. We also show how our analysis applies to coordination games in general, using the beauty contest framework. In the third chapter my co-author and I show that the same inefficiencies characterized in the previous chapter take place in standard business cycle models. In a RBC framework with dispersed information about technology shocks, distortions due to market power have no effect on incentives to respond to information, but distort the private value of information, leading to an inefficiently low level of information acquired in equilibrium. In a monetary model with nominal price-setting by heterogeneously informed firms, inefficiencies arise in both the use and the acquisition of information.

Author: Adam Hubert Gulan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Macroeconomics
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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This dissertation consists of three separate essays in the field of international macroeconomics. The objective of the first and third chapters is to add to the understanding of some of the aspects of international business cycle fluctuations, both of developed economies, as well as developing ones. The second chapter sheds some new light on the behavior of current account positions in advanced economies. In the first chapter, I revisit the consumption correlation as well as the Backus--Smith puzzles by inspecting the role of financial markets. Relative to the existing literature, I introduce explicit international trade in stocks and bonds in an otherwise standard model of international business cycles. The results show that markets with symmetric trade in stocks allow for a high degree of risk sharing and closely mimic the Arrow--Debreu economy despite being formally incomplete. Risk sharing decreases in asymmetric stock and nominal bond markets, but is still higher than in a single commodity bond economy. The results, therefore, cast doubt on the explanation of the two puzzles based on highly restricted asset trade and large degree of market incompleteness. I also provide empirical evidence that output net of investment and government spending tends to be less correlated across countries than consumption, much less than output itself. This constitutes a new form of the consumption correlation puzzle. The puzzle can be accounted for in the presence of high home bias and low elasticities of substitution between domestic and foreign baskets. In the second chapter, I apply the weak axiom of revealed preference theory (WARP) in the context of a 2-period model of the current account. According to this argument, certain changes in current account positions should be precluded. In particular, a country which initially ran a current account deficit, should remain in deficit after the exogenously given interest rate drops. Similarly, a country running a surplus should remain a lender if the interest rate goes up. The argument holds for both an endowment economy as well as for a model with production. To check whether the changes in CA positions are in line with WARP I employ econometric models of binary choice on a panel of 22 developed economies. The results suggest that the axiom is largely at work, i.e. I find no statistical evidence of violations of the revealed preference axiom in all but one regression. In the third chapter, I turn the attention to the peculiarities of business cycle fluctuations in developing countries. Countercyclical country interest rates have been shown to be both a distinctive characteristic and an important driving force of business cycles in emerging markets. In order to capture this, most business cycle models of emerging economies have nonetheless relied on ad hoc and exogenous countercyclical interest rate processes. I offer a solution to this shortcoming by embedding a financial contract a la citet{bgg1999} into a standard real business cycle model of a small open economy. Because of the existence of agency problems between foreign lenders and domestic borrowers, this financial structure allows me to fully endogenize the existence of an external finance premium that drives country interest rates. I then take the model to data from emerging economies and show that this modification allows to properly account for many of the stylized facts of business cycles in emerging economies, particularly the strong volatility and countercyclicality of interest rates. I also fit the model to data from developed small open economies and find that the estimated parameters that define the financial contract differ in nontrivial ways from those estimated to emerging economies.