Author: Hilde PatronPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Federal Reserve banks
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
Three Essays on Uncertainty and Learning by Economic Agents
Author: Hilde PatronPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Federal Reserve banks
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
Three Essays in the Economics of Uncertainty
Author: Three Essays in the Economics of Uncertainty
Author: David Aaron SykesPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Probabilities
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
Three Essays on Investment Under Uncertainty
Author: Gaurav Atreyi KankanhalliPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 199
Book Description
In this dissertation, I explore how economic agents conduct their investment decisions under uncertainty. Each of the three chapters empirically tests predictions from real-options frameworks of investment under uncertainty, shedding light on novel dimensions of agents' investment responses to uncertainty. In the first chapter, I study how the startup ecosystem responds to uncertainty. In the second chapter, I empirically measure the international transmission of uncertainty by examining US firms' investment responses to uncertainty induced by the 2016 Brexit Referendum. In the third chapter, I examine how uncertainty affects not only the level, but also the composition, of firms' capital stock using data on global shipping firms' investment and disinvestment decisions. Chapter 1 shows that economic uncertainty boosts dynamism among US startups. I introduce news- and survey-based measures of startup-relevant uncertainty and find that uncertainty is associated with net firm creation, and net job creation among young firms. I identify the channel by demonstrating, in a real-options framework, that venture capitalists (VCs) adjust their portfolios to take advantage of uncertainty. In contrast to mature firms delaying investment when facing uncertainty, VCs increase their investment spending during periods of heightened uncertainty, but do so by funding a large number of startups at low valuations. Critically, these dynamics play out solely at the earliest funding stages, implying greater experimentation by VCs. Buoyed by increased VC funding, startups accelerate their investment in technology and labor, producing more innovation and gaining greater traction. Looking at eventual outcomes, I provide evidence that startups receiving funding during high uncertainty periods are more likely to either fail or have exits with high multiples. My results point to uncertainty playing an important role in spurring "creative destruction" by stimulating risky startup activity in the economy. Chapter 2 (joint with Murillo Campello, Gustavo S. Cortes, and Fabricio D'Almeida) shows that the 2016 Brexit Referendum led American corporations to cut jobs and investment within US borders. Using establishment-level data, we document that these effects were modulated by the degree of reversibility of capital and labor. American job losses were particularly pronounced in industries with less skilled and more unionized workers. UK-exposed firms with less redeployable capital and high input-offshoring dependence cut investment the most. Data on the near-universe of US establishments also point to measurable, negative effects on establishment turnover (openings and closings). Our results demonstrate how foreign-born political uncertainty is transmitted across international borders, shaping domestic capital formation and labor allocation. Chapter 3 (joint with Murillo Campello and Hyunseob Kim) studies how economic uncertainty affects corporate asset composition and productivity using near-universe data on shipping firms' new orders, secondary-market transactions, and demolition of ships. Using a real-options framework, we show that shipping firms curtail both the acquisition and disposal of ships in response to heightened uncertainty. Critically, this mechanism operates primarily through cuts in new ship orders and demolition of older vessels -- decisions that are harder to reverse vis-a-vis deals in the used ship market. We use the escalation in Somali pirate attacks from 2009-2011 as a plausibly exogenous shock to uncertainty and find consistent results. The dynamics we identify are more pronounced when secondary ship markets are less liquid, as firms face stronger incentives to delay their decisions. Our results are novel in showing that uncertainty hampers "creative destruction" among mature firms in which these firms adopt technological innovation emobdied in newer capital and dispose of old-vintage capital.
Three Essays on Economic Behavior Under Uncertainty
Author: Kaïs DachraouiAmerican Doctoral Dissertations
Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertation abstracts
Languages : en
Pages : 776
Book Description
Three Essays on Exchange Rate Dynamics and Model Uncertainty
Author: Edouard Tsague DjeutemPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 93
Book Description
At least since Knight (1921), economists have suspected that the distinction between risk and ̀uncertainty' might be important in economics. However,Savage (1954) showed this distinction is meaningless if agents adhere to certain axioms, which seem to be normatively compelling. Savage's SubjectiveExpected Utility (SEU) model became the dominant paradigm in economics, and remains so to this very day. Still, suspicions that the distinction matters never really died. The Ellsberg Paradox (1961) first raised doubts about the SEU model. Then, Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) showed how to modifySavage's axioms so that the distinction does matter. In their model, agents entertain a set of priors, and optimize against the worst-caseprior. Finally, Hansen and Sargent (2008) operationalized this new approach by linking it to the engineering literature on ̀robust control'. My dissertationapplies the Hansen-Sargent framework to the foreign exchange market. I show that if we think of market participants as confronting both uncertainty andrisk, then we can easily explain several well known empirical puzzles in the foreign exchange market.The second chapter of my dissertation, entitled "Robustness and Exchange Rate Volatility", was published in the Journal of International Economics in 2013, and is coauthored with my supervisor, Prof. Kenneth Kasa. This paper uses the monetary model of exchange rates. It assumes investors are aware of their own lack of knowledge about the economy. They respond to their ignorance strategically, by constructing forecasts that are robust to model misspecification. We show that revisions of robust forecasts are more sensitive to new information, and can easily explain observed violations of Shiller's variance bound inequality.The third chapter, entitled "Model Uncertainty and the Forward Premium Puzzle", was published in the "Journal of International Money and Finance" in 2014. It studies a standard two-country Lucas (1982) asset-pricing model. The main objective is to understand the determinants of observed excess return in the foreign exchange market. The paper shows that Hansen-Jagannathan (1991) volatility bounds can be attained with both reasonable degrees of risk aversion and empirically plausible detection error probabilities. Hence, excess returns in the foreign exchange market appear to be primarily driven by a ̀model uncertainty premium' rather than a risk premium.The fourth chaper, entitled "Robust Learning in the Foreign Exchange Market", was recently revised and resubmitted to the "Canadian Journal of Economics". Following Hansen and Sargent (2010), it assumes agents cope with uncertainty by both learning and by formulating robust decision rules. Agents entertain two competing models, differing by the persistence of consumption growth. As in my previous paper, agents continue to doubt the specification of each model. It shows that robust learning can not only explain unconditional risk premia in the foreign exchange market, but can also explain the cyclical dynamics of risk premia. In particular, an empirically plausible concern for model misspecification and model uncertainty generates a stochastic discount factor that uniformly satisfies the spectral Hansen-Jagannathan bound of Otrok et. al. (2007).
Three Essays on Economic Behavior Under Uncertainty, Theory and Empirical Evidences
Author: Essays on Uncertainty in Economics
Author: Alp SimsekPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
(cont.) learn about the health of the trading partners of the trading partners of the trading partners, and so on. At some point, the cost of information gathering becomes too unmanageable for banks, uncertainty spikes, and they have no option but to withdraw from loan commitments and illiquid positions. A flight-to-quality ensues, and the financial crisis spreads. The fourth essay, joint with Daron Acemoglu, analyzes the effect of uncertainty of a special kind, that involves economic agents' private actions and anonymous market transactions, on the functioning and efficiency of competitive markets. Despite a sizeable literature, how competitive markets deal with this type of uncertainty remains unclear. A "folk theorem" originating, among others, in the work of Stiglitz maintains that competitive equilibria are always or "generically" inefficient (unless contracts directly specify consumption levels as in Prescott and Townsend, thus bypassing trading in anonymous markets). This essay critically reevaluates these claims in the context of a general equilibrium economy with moral hazard. Our results delineate a range of benchmark situations in which equilibria have very strong optimality properties. They also suggest that considerable care is necessary in invoking the folk theorem about the inefficiency of competitive equilibria with private information.
Essays in Contemporary Fields of Economics
Author: George HorwichPublisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9780911198591
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Book Description
This volume honors Emanuel T. Weiler, the founder and first dean of Purdue University's School of Management and of the Krannert Graduate School of Management. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Weiler created a unique academic environment within which innovative and lasting contributions were made to both the teaching and content of economics and management. Members of the original economics faculty recruited by Weiler as well as several of their students wrote this collection of essays. All but one of the papers were prepared expressly for the volume and have not been published previously. The essays cover diverse areas which evolved from Weiler's leadership. The work has four major topical divisions (Economic Theory, Applied Economics, Macroeconomics, and Economics Education) plus a section of four memoirs.