Luận văn - Luận án nước ngoài

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Multimodal transportation systems : modelling challenges
([S.l.], 2012) Mahrous, Reem Fawzy; Brussel, M.J.G.; Bosch, F.H.M. van den; Maarseveen, M.F.A.M. van; Brands, T.
Human mobility within an urban usually happens over a multimodal transportation network. For that reason, when studying, analyzing transportation systems we should not consider each mode of transport separately but we should look to it as multimodal transportation system with relations and dynamics between its components. In order to do any analysis relatedto transportation we need a model reflecting the multimodal nature of the system. The objective of the research is to develop a GIS data model for a multimodal transportation system combining different modes in one network that allows different modal combination in route planning. The modelling concept adopted in this research is formulated by exploring the different GIS modelling techniques formultimodal transportation from literature, and experimenting with them. It consists mainly on having a separate entity (layer, feature class...) for each mode route representing this mode’s network. Modes networks are physicallyseparated from each other. The separation is vertical for different modes and horizontal for the different routes of the same mode. Connecting these separated entities is done through connectors entities representing the transfer action from one route to the other. The concept is applied at ArcGIS platform. The effectiveness of the data model suggested is evaluated by developing a multimodal transportation network model for Enschede city incorporating bus, train, cycling and walking modes and performing path finding analysis with the developed network model. The model developed has proved satisfaction in finding route over a multimodal network using the suitable modal combination that achieves the least cost path. The developed model is also able to simulate all the possible transfer scenarios between the integrated modes and to integrate the cost associated with the different elements, the cost of travelling and the transfer cost. The whole route details including the step by step directions and the detailed as well as the overall cost are also provided with the route. Beside the path finding type of analysis, the data model presented in this research can be a platform for other transportation network based types of analysis.
Essays on dynamic macroeconomics
([Stellenbosch University], 2014) Steinbach, Max Rudibert; Smit, B. W.; Du Plessis, S. A.
In the first essay of this thesis, a medium scale DSGE model is developed and estimated for the South African economy. When used for forecasting, the model is found to outperform private sector economists when forecasting CPI inflation, GDP growth and the policy rate over certain horizons. In the second essay, the benchmark DSGE model is extended to include the yield on South African 10-year government bonds. The model is then used to decompose the 10-year yield spread into (1) the structural shocks that contributed to its evolution during the inflation targeting regime of the South African Reserve Bank, as well as (2) an expected yield and a term premium. In addition, it is found that changes in the South African term premium may predict future real economic activity. Finally, the need for DSGE models to take account of financial frictions became apparent during the recent global financial crisis. As a result, the final essay incorporates a stylised banking sector into the benchmark DSGE model described above. The optimal response of the South African Reserve Bank to financial shocks is then analysed within the context of this structural model.
Education and country growth models
([Stellenbosch University], 2014) Gustafsson, Martin Anders; Van der Berg, Servaas
The over-arching concern of the three parts of the dissertation is how economics can and should influence education policymaking, the emphasis on the economics side being models of country development and the contribution made by human capital. Part I begins with a review of economic growth theory. How educational performance and country development have been measured is then discussed, with considerable attention going towards conceptual and measurement complexities associated with the latter. An approach is presented for expanding the number of countries whose educational quality can be compared, by expanding the number of linkable testing programmes. This approach, which above all allows for the inclusion of more African and Latin American countries, is one of the key contributions made by the dissertation to the existing body of knowledge. Three existing empirical growth models are examined, including work by Hanushek and Woessman on the relationship between educational quality and income. Part I ends with a discussion on how the economics literature can best be packaged to influence education policymaking. A ‘growth simulator’ tool in Excel for informing the policy discourse is presented. The production of this tool includes establishing empirically a feasible improvement trajectory for educational quality that policymakers can use and some analysis of how linguistic fractionalisation in a country evolves over time. This tool can be considered a further key output of the dissertation. A basic model for relating educational quality, via income growth, to teacher pay, is presented. Part II offers an analysis of UNESCO country-level data on enrolment and spending going back to 1970, with a view to establishing historical patterns that can inform education planners, particularly those in developing countries, on how budgets and enrolment expansion should be distributed across the levels of the education system. The analysis presented in Part II represents a novel way of using existing countrylevel data and can be seen as an important step towards filling a gap experienced by education policymakers, namely the paucity of empirical evidence that can guide decisions around the prioritisation of education levels. Part II moreover arrives at a few empirical findings, including the finding that enrolment and spending patterns have been systematically different in countries with faster economic growth and the finding that historical per student spending at the secondary level appears to play a larger role in development than was previously thought. Part III contrasts the available economic advice for education policymakers with what policymakers actually appear to believe in. The focus falls, in particular, on four developing countries: South Africa, Brazil, Chile and China. A few areas where economists could explore the data to a greater degree or communicate available findings differently, in the interests of better education policies, are identified. Part III partly serves as a demonstration of how comparisons between education systems can be better oriented towards providing advice to education policymakers on questions relating to efficiency and equity.
Essays on financial markets and macroeconomic activities
([Boston University], 2014) Mok, Junghwan; Gilchrist, Simon
This thesis consists of three papers addressing different aspects of financial markets and macroeconomic activities. Firm Risks, Credit, and Labor Market Fluctuations studies the effect of changes in firm risks on the cyclical properties of the labor market. I develop a general equilibrium model in which the adjustment of employment is costly. Financial frictions arise from the limited liability property of the contract between lenders and firms. The changes in firm risks alter the amount of debt that firms can borrow to finance their working capital. This mechanism amplifies labor market fluctuations and displays a countercyclical external finance premium, consistent with the empirical evidence. Shadow Banks and Stabilization Policies studies the interaction between commercial banks and shadow banks and the effect of stabilization policies. I develop a general equilibrium model in which the shadow banks obtain loans from commercial banks in the form of short-term collateralized debt. The moral hazard creates volatile leverage of shadow banks, which makes the economy more vulnerable to economic shocks. Upon an aggregate disturbance, a stabilization policy in the form of direct lending is relatively more efficient than policies aimed at the shadow-banking sector. Bank Capital and Lending: An Analysis of Commercial Banks in the United States empirically evaluates the impact of bank capital on lending patterns of commercial banks in the United States. Using two different measures of capital, namely the capital adequacy ratio and tier 1 ratio, we find a moderate relationship between bank equity and lending. We also use an innovative instrumental variables methodology that helps us overcome the endogeneity issues that are common in such analyses.
Implications of population aging for education, technological progress and economic growth
([Australian School of Business, UNSW], 2014) Xiao, Chen; Woodland, Alan
This thesis is primarily concerned with the potential roles of individual aging (changes in people’s productivity and innovation capacity from young to old) and population aging (increased proportion of old to young people in the population) in determining rates of innovation and technological progress. Since economic growth depends largely on innovation, this thesis will investigate whether and how economic growth is affected by individual aging or population aging.To study individual aging, this thesis constructs a model of technology innovation and adoption and economic growth. Individuals’ innovative and adoptive abilities change with age. This model shows that individual aging slows down technological progress of countries far from the world frontier more than it does for countries closer to the world frontier. This suggests that individual aging could be an explanation for the technology differences between developed and developing countries.To examine the impact of population aging on growth, this thesis constructs models combining population aging, discrete time overlapping-generation, endogenous economic growth and education in general equilibrium. Under both autarky and international trade environments, the impacts of population aging on three major aspects are studied, and they are educational efforts, directed technical change and skill premia. Population aging tends to increase educational efforts and the rate of technological progress. The impacts of population aging upon directed technical change depend on the relative strength of price and market size effects. Moreover, population aging decreases skill premia under autarky, but increases skill premia under trade equilibrium.Overall, this thesis highlights the important roles of individual and population aging in understanding innovation and economic growth.
Essays in macroeconomics of emerging markets
([Boston College], 2014) Bhate, Rucha; Ghironi, Fabio; Baum, Christopher
My dissertation focuses on the macroeconomics of emerging and developing nations. This group of economies is characterized by significant differences in terms of institutional quality, financial development, as well as other cultural, social, political parameters. In turn, these structural heterogeneities exert considerable influence on their domestic economic environment, specifically impacting key macroeconomic indicators such as output, investment, consumption, foreign capital flows, exchange rates etc. Understanding these nuanced relationships and analyzing them from various dimensions has served as the motivation and the foundation of my doctoral research. The first essay is an empirical and theoretical investigation of Business Cycles and Macroeconomic Dynamics in post-independence India. India's growth performance was touted as ordinary relative to the rest of the world during the first three decades after it gained independence in 1947. However, path-breaking deregulation and liberalization reforms in the 80s and 90s led to substantial growth acceleration and India's metamorphosis into a market-based economic system with strong international ties. This makes the Indian case study really unique and fascinating. Using annual time series data, we document key business cycle properties of the Indian economy. Output, consumption and investment are more volatile in India compared to its developed country counterparts. As in developed countries, consumption is less volatile and investment is more volatile than output in the Indian data. In contrast, investment is not highly correlated with output in India. Moreover, India's economic landscape has undergone significant changes, both in terms of the absolute level and cyclical fluctuations, across the planning horizon. The presence of structural break is reported for major macroeconomic variables when we decompose the data into pre- and post-reform categories. We also test whether a standard real business cycle (closed economy) model with India-specific parameters can replicate the stylized features of the business cycle. The model includes a tax on capital income which acts as a disincentive for future investment, and the results indicate that a high volatility of the tax shock is required to produce the low investment output correlation. The model performs reasonably well in matching the correlation dynamics observed in the data. In the second essay, I examine Foreign Reserve accumulation in Developing Countries through the lens of Institutional Quality and Financial Development. In recent times, several emerging markets have been providing the rest of the world, and especially the United States, with net resources in the form of current account surpluses. The most noteworthy aspect of the surge in upstream foreign capital flows has been the enormous increase in international reserves held by several emerging economies. Whereas private capital flows are broadly in sync with the standard neoclassical model, capital outflows from relatively high-productivity emerging markets can be explained by the accumulation of official reserve assets. I investigate the foreign reserve dynamics in developing countries; from both an empirical and theoretical dimension. Using a novel panel dataset combining aspects of openness, institutional quality, and financial development and an innovative clustering method; I present a new approach to identify cross-national structural heterogeneity and assess its relationship with foreign reserves. I use partition-based cluster analysis to document underlying reserve dynamics and identify systematic variation across and between different country groups. The resulting cluster outputs reflect the presence of cross-national variations in reserve accumulation. Moreover, a series of the scatter plots encapsulating various dimensions of institutional quality and financial development points towards the resounding presence of structural heterogeneity in foreign reserve dynamics in our developing country sample. Cross section and panel data regressions reinforce the initial hypotheses concerning the role of institutional and financial development in international reserve dynamics of the developing world. I also build a theoretical model embedding the key insights from the empirical analyses in order to propose a coherent framework for explaining the link between institutions, financial development reserve accumulation. The model underscores the importance of financial market efficiency and the institutional environment in explaining reserve dynamics of major developing countries. A series of comparative static exercises shed light on the impact of heterogeneity in institutional parameters and foreign reserve policy on select macroeconomic variables. In a nutshell, by going beyond the regional differences, we provide a unique vantage point to understand how disparities in institutional and financial conditions influence reserve dynamics in different country clusters. Our results indicate that income, openness, institutional quality and financial development play an instrumental role in explaining the underlying patterns of reserves accumulation in the developing world. However, the effects of these structural indicators are markedly different across clusters of relatively similar countries in terms of their magnitude as well as direction.
Essays on dynamic information economics
([Boston University], 2014) Wong, Tak-Yuen; Miao, Jianjun
This dissertation studies moral hazard problems and an information acquisition problem in dynamic economic environments. In chapter 1, I study a continuous-time principal-agent model in which a risk-neutral agent protected by limited liability exerts costly efforts to manage a project for her principal. Unobserved risk-taking by the agent is value-reducing in the sense that it increases the chance of large losses, even though it raises short-term profits. In the optimal contract, severe punishment that follows a large loss prevents the agent from taking hidden risks. However, after some histories, punishment can no longer be used because of limited liability. The principal allows the agent to take hidden risk when the firm is close to liquidation. In addition, I explore the roles of standard securities in implementing the optimal contract. The implementation shows that driven by the agency conflicts, incomplete hedging against Poisson risk provides incentives for the agent to take the safe project. Moreover, I study the optimality of "high-water mark" contract widely used in the hedge fund industry and find that "distance-to-threshold" is important in understanding the risk-shifting problem in a dynamic context. In chapter 2, I study a continuous-time moral hazard model in which the principal hires a team of agents to run the business. The firm consists of multiple divisions and agents exert costly efforts to improve the divisional cash flows. The firm size evolves stochastically based on the aggregate cash flows.The model delivers a negative relationship between firm sizes and pay-for-divisional incentives, and I characterize conditions under which joint/relative performance evaluation will be used. I also explore the implications of team production on the firm's optimal capital structure and financial policy. In chapter 3, I study a multi-armed bandits problem with ambiguity. Decision-maker views the probabilities underlying each arm as imprecise and his preference is represented by recursive multiple-priors. I show that the classical "Gittins Index" generalizes to a "Multiple-Priors Gittins Index". In the setting with one safe arm and one ambiguous arm, the decision-maker plays the ambiguous arm if its "Multiple-Priors Gittins Index" is higher than the return delivered by the safe arm. In the multi-armed environment, I obtain the "Multiple-Priors Index Theorem" which states that the optimal strategy for the decision-maker is to play the ambiguous arm with the highest Multiple-Priors Index.
Essays on institutions, economic development, and inequality
([Florida State University], 2014) Bennett, Daniel L.; Benson, Bruce L.; Gwartney, James D.
It is commonly asserted that free market capitalism promotes economic efficiency at the expense of equality. This view is reflected in the common claim that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The current research examines how economic institutions consistent with economic freedom, which approximates the degree to which a nation is committed to free market capitalism, impact economic inequality. Two common concepts of economic inequality are between-nation and within-nation inequality. Chapter two can be thought of how economic freedom impacts between-nation inequality. Institutions were largely spread throughout the world during the European colonization era, providing a natural experiment in history. The analysis simultaneously accounts for the two prevailing institutional theories of post-colonial development, settlement conditions and identity of the colonizer, to empirically examine the causal impact of economic institutions on comparative economic development. The results suggest that favorable settlements conditions and colonization by Britain resulted in the development of more market-oriented economic institutions, resulting in sustained long-run economic development. The positive impact of favorable settlement conditions on institutional and economic development was partially offset when France, Portugal, or Spain was the colonizer. Poor settlement conditions led to poor institutions and economic stagnation, regardless of the colonizer. The results are robust to a number of alternative theories of economic development, suggesting that economic freedom is a positive causal determinant of modern levels of per capita income and that institutional differences between countries are largely responsible for the large disparity in average living standards that exists in the world today. As such, a significant portion of between-nation inequality is attributable to heterogeneous levels of economic freedom. How economic freedom impacts within nation inequality has been much less studied, partially because of the lack of inequality measures that are comparable across countries. Chapter three examines the concept and measurement of economic inequality. It describes the construction of a custom inequality dataset as well as several other inequality measures that are used for the analyses in chapters four and five. Chapter four examines the ambiguous economic freedom-inequality relationship. A simple theoretical framework demonstrates this ambiguity. A review of the existing literature suggests that the empirical relationship follows the theoretical, as several studies have looked at the issue empirically but often reached contradictory results. Each of the main studies has employed a different econometric model, possibly providing an explanation for the inconsistent results. Using eight alternative measures of inequality, additional empirical analysis of the four main econometric models from the literature suggests that the same model specifications are often sensitive to the measure of inequality and/or economic freedom, country sample, and/or time period examined. The analysis from chapter four suggests that additional research on the channels through which economic institutions impact inequality is needed. Chapter five is a first step in this direction, as it empirically examines the historical influence of factor endowments and legal tradition on the development of legal institutions and the rule of law, and their importance for determining modern levels of within-nation inequality. Consistent with the Engerman-Sokoloff and Friedman Hypotheses, elites in society have historically sought to protect their status and perpetuate inequality by influencing the development of legal institutions and the rule of law in their favor at the expense of the population. Factor endowments suitable for plantation relative to family farming and the receipt of the French civil law tradition aided the elites in their quest to perpetuate economic inequality through the creation of poor legal institutions, while endowments suitable for family farming and/or the receipt of one of the other legal traditions hindered these efforts. The results from this chapter suggest that legal and property rights institutions that promote equality before the law, which are characteristic of a market economy, result in more equitable distributions of income. Chapter six offers conclusions, summarizing the key findings and practical implications of the current research, as well as identifying several areas for future research.
Analyses of sustainability goals : applying statistical models to socio-economic and environmental data
([Georgia Institute of Technology], 2014) Tindall, Nathaniel W.; Crittenden, John; Thomas, Valerie
This research investigates the environment and development issues of three stakeholders at multiple scales—global, national, regional, and local. Through the analysis of financial, social, and environmental metrics, the potential benefits and risks of each case study are estimated, and their implications are considered. In the first case study, the relationship of manufacturing and environmental performance is investigated. Over 700 facilities of a global manufacturer that produce 11 products on six continents were investigated to understand global variations and determinants of environmental performance. Water, energy, carbon dioxide emissions, and production data from these facilities were analyzed to assess environmental performance; the relationship of production composition at the individual firm and environmental performance were investigated. Location-independent environmental performance metrics were combined to provide both global and local measures of environmental performance. These models were extended to estimate future water use, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions considering potential demand shifts. Natural resource depletion risks were investigated, and mitigation strategies related to vulnerabilities and exposure were discussed. The case study demonstrated how data from multiple facilities can be used to characterize the variability amongst facilities and to preview how changes in production may affect overall corporate environmental metrics. The developed framework adds a new approach to account for environmental performance and degradation as well as assess potential risk in locations where climate change may affect the availability of production resources (i.e., water and energy) and thus, is a tool for understanding risk and maintaining competitive advantage. The second case study was designed to address the issue of delivering affordable and sustainable energy. Energy pricing was evaluated by modeling individual energy consumption behaviors. This analysis simulated a heterogeneous set of residential households in both the urban and rural environments in order to understand demand shifts in the residential energy end-use sector due to the effects of electricity pricing. An agent-based model (ABM) was created to investigate the interactions of energy policy and individual household behaviors; the model incorporated empirical data on beliefs and perceptions of energy. The environmental beliefs, energy pricing grievances, and social networking dynamics were integrated into the ABM model structure. This model projected the aggregate residential sector electricity demand throughout the 30-year time period as well as distinguished the respective number of households who only use electricity, that use solely rely on indigenous fuels, and that incorporate both indigenous fuels and electricity. The model is one of the first characterizations of household electricity demand response and fuel transitions related to energy pricing at the individual household level, and is one of the first approaches to evaluating consumer grievance and rioting response to energy service delivery. The model framework is suggested as an innovative tool for energy policy analysis and can easily be revised to assist policy makers in other developing countries. In the final case study, a framework was developed for a broad cost-benefit and greenhouse gas evaluation of transit systems and their associated developments. A case study was developed of the Atlanta BeltLine. The net greenhouse gas emissions from the BeltLine light rail system will depend on the energy efficiency of the streetcars themselves, the greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity used to power the streetcars, the extent to which people use the BeltLine instead of driving personal vehicles, and the efficiency of their vehicles. The effects of ridership, residential densities, and housing mix on environmental performance were investigated and were used to estimate the overall system efficacy. The range of the net present value of this system was estimated considering health, congestion, per capita greenhouse gas emissions, and societal costs and benefits on a time-varying scale as well as considering the construction and operational costs. The 95% confidence interval was found with a range bounded by a potential loss of $860 million and a benefit of $2.3 billion; the mean net present value was $610 million. It is estimated that the system will generate a savings of $220 per ton of emitted CO2 with a 95% confidence interval bounded by a potential social cost of $86 cost per ton CO2 and a savings of $595 per ton CO2.
Essays in the political economy of information
([Harvard University], 2014) Cage, Julia; Nunn, Nathan
The primary focus of this dissertation is on information, its production and dissemination in society. In the first chapter, I explore the consequences of an increase in the number of newspapers on the quantity and quality of news provided and, ultimately, changes in political participation, using a new panel of local newspaper presence and political turnout in France from 1945 to 2012. My results shed new light on the role played by consumers' heterogeneity and increasing returns to scale in news production, and have implications for the study of the relationship between media competition and political participation.
Impact of climate-responsive controls and land usage on regional climate and air quality
([Georgia Institute of Technology], 2014) Trail, Marcus Alexander; Russell, Armistead G.
Impacts of Climate-responsive Controls and Land Usage on Regional Climate and Air Quality Marcus A. Trail 201 pages Directed by Dr. Armistead G. Russell Regional air quality impacts public health, visibility and ecosystem health, and is significantly affected by changes in climate, land use and pollutant emissions. Predictions of regional air quality responses to such changes can help inform policy makers in the development of effective approaches to both reduce greenhouse gases and improve air quality. However, major sources of uncertainty exist in predicting future air quality including limitations in the tools used to project future emissions, land use changes and uncertainties associated with predicting future climate. Recently, technical advances in downscaling global climate simulations to regional scales, and, the development of bottom-up operational tools used to forecast emissions have enhanced our ability to account for the complex interactions between population, socio-economic development, technological change, and federal and regional environmental policies. The results show that emissions reductions strategies will continue to play a vital role in improving air quality over the U.S. while CO2 emission reduction policies can have mixed positive and negative impacts on air quality. However, additional costs will be necessary to reach air quality goals due to climate change because deeper emission reductions will be required to compensate for a warmer climate, even if current efforts are predicted to show improvement. The results of this study also show that regional climate and O3 and aerosol concentrations are highly sensitive to reforestation and cropland conversion in the Southeast and these land use changes should be considered in air quality management plans.
The economics of innovation and intellectual property rights
([University of New South Wales], 2014) Wang, Changtao; Fox, Kevin; Ghosh, Arghya
This thesis makes contributions to the economics of intellectual property rights (IPR)from different perspectives in three distinct but related empirical studies. First, patentand trademark statistics are used as innovation measures to examine the long-runrelationship between innovation and output in countries with long-established IPRsystems. The findings show that innovations may not always play a positive role indriving economic growth. Post-World War II evidence for some countries with extensivemeasured innovations (the US, and Germany) shows innovation's non-positiveeffects on economic growth, despite innovation's positive effects for the previous period.However, innovation retains a positive role in Japan, France and Australia.Despite the importance of innovation, risk often decreases the incentive to innovate,and can lead to R&D under-investment problems relative to the social optimum.Patents play an essential role in addressing this problem. This role is evaluated inthe Australian context by estimating the value of patent rights and calculating thecorresponding equivalent subsidy rate (ESR). The average value of patent rights forAustralian patents filed during 1980-1992 ranges from AU$9,000 to AU$17,000, whichis lower than the findings of the European and US studies. However, the ESR rangeof 3.2% to 8.4% is higher than that of large developed economies, indicating that thepatent system of Australia has outperformed the systems of other countries.One shortcoming of using patents as an innovation measure is the small number ofpatent users, which is less than secrecy users. Consequently, we examine determinantsof firms' choices of patenting versus secrecy using Australian data, with a focus onthe theory of Henry and Ponce (2011), predicting that firms' preference for secrecyover patents increases with knowledge tradability. In an important improvement overstandard empirical practice, a trivariate-probit model is constructed to correct for theendogeneity of the key dummy regressor in a bivariate-probit model. As a robustnesscheck, the potential sample selection bias caused by using only the innovator subsamplewas corrected. Key findings include that knowledge-trading firms and major R&Dinvestors are more likely to use secrecy than patents, providing evidence for theory andimportant insights to inform R&D and IPR policy.
Three essays on investment
([University of Michigan], 2015) Mocanu, Ana-Maria
This dissertation studies the supply and demand of capital goods, and the effects of investment tax incentives. Chapter II examines the effects of investment tax incentives. The evidence indicates that subsidies increase capital goods purchases more than domestic production so investment subsidies also stimulate foreign capital goods producers. At capital producing firms, measures of economic increase substantially following an investment tax subsidy. The data is used to estimate the key parameters of a multi-sector, open-economy DSGE model with capita and labor adjustment costs. In the estimated model, investment tax incentives are strong enough to cause noticeable changes in aggregate economic activity. The import supply elasticity is considerable, allowing investment to rise even in the short-run in response to investment subsidies. Chapter III develops an equilibrium model of investment with retiming costs at the micro-level. In the benchmark case in which investment retiming costs are zero, this model and standard fixed-costs models generate virtually identical aggregate predictions. If the timing adjustment costs are positive, then capital goods prices may exhibit predictable changes over time. Simulated impulse responses in the quantitative model are then used to analyze the effects of retiming costs on the effectiveness of investment of tax subsidies, the economy’s reaction to transitory investment supply shocks, and an out-of-steady state distribution of capital vintages. In the presence of retiming costs, temporary subsidies are less effective and cause a fall in investment after they expire. Additionally, investment supply shocks have an attenuated effect of investment relative to the benchmark case. Chapter IV studies the supply of capital goods. The data indicate that for equipment, the elasticity of investment supply is considerable, while for structures the elasticity of investment supply is close to unity. After calibrating the elasticity of investment supply, investment supply shocks are recovered for each capital type. Using a mix of reduced-form and structural time-series techniques, the structural parameters of the permanent and transitory components for each series are estimated from the data. The analysis suggests that permanent shocks are more prominent than transitory shocks and that the permanent and transitory components are strongly negatively correlated.
Essays in macro and labor economics
([University of Minnesota], 2015) Ma, Shihui; Guvenen, Fatih
This dissertation includes two chapters. The first chapter studies the labor market effect of the college expansion policy in China. In 1999, the Chinese government embarked on a program to increase the entry class to tertiary education by 42% from the previous year; the college admission rate stayed at the higher level since then. The expansion of college education represents a large and exogenous increase in supply of the college graduates to the labor market. This paper identifies the key role of the relative college labor supply in driving the changes of college wage premium after the expansion program. Assuming imperfect substitutability of workers in different education and age groups, I propose an overlapping-generation model with endogenous educational choice to account for college premium trends in distinct demographic groups. The estimation results provide the basis for evaluating the welfare effects of the college expansion in different subgroups. In the second chapter, which is co-authored with Huo Zhen, we try to understand the excess consumption volatility in the emerging countries. In emerging markets, business cycles are characterized by higher consumption volatility relative to output and strongly counter-cyclical current accounts. Meanwhile, agents in emerging countries face higher uncertainty in forecasting economic fundamentals. We build a general equilibrium business cycle model with heterogeneous income profiles and imperfect information. Agents observe their income to learn the growth rate of their individual human capital and the growth rate of the aggregate economy. Due to information frictions, a shock to the growth rate of the aggregate economy will be partly attributed to the growth rate of agents' own human capital, the latter of which has more persistent effects on agents' life-time income. As a result, the economy features higher consumption volatility than the output. Quantitatively, we find that the model can successfully explain the excessive volatility of consumption and generate a strongly negative correlation between the trade balance and output for a wide range of TFP and income processes.
Essays in economics and econometrics
([University of New South Wales], 2015) Finlay, Richard; Kulish, Mariano; Morley, James
The body of this thesis consists of three published papers written while enrolled in a PhD; in addition, two published papers completed while enrolled in a Master of Economics are included in an appendix. Of the five papers, four are largely empirical in nature, with the subject matter reflecting my (and my employer the Reserve Bank of Australia’s) interest in areas relevant to policy-making institutions in Australia. The findings of this body of work can be summarised as follows: housing wealth effects in Australia arise from an easing of collateral constrains and a common association between rising house prices and another factor such as rising income expectations, rather than through ‘traditional wealth effects’; the rise in Australian household saving over the 2000s appears to have been driven by a reduction in permanent income expectations following the financial crisis and a desire to pay down debt and rebuild assets; negative credit‐supply shocks explain one-third to one-half of the fall in credit growth seen over the financial crisis, and around one-sixth of the fall in GDP growth, and so played an important but not dominant role in economic outcomes over the period; and much of the quarter-to-quarter volatility in Australian GDP data appears due to measurement error. The fifth paper is very different — it is a theoretical econometrics paper with little obvious application to policy-making. The paper is nonetheless a contribution to the literature in that it makes available via construction a new class of highly flexible (in terms of both permissible marginal distribution and permissible correlation structure) non-Gaussian random field, for possible use in economic and/or financial modelling.
Essays on money and financial institutions in the history of economic thought, USA history, and theory
([University of California], 2015) Komai, Alejandro Toyofusa; Richardson, Gary; Rocheteau, Guillaume
I study the institution of money. I provide a history of the real bills doctrine in its various forms through debates with the quantity theory of money. I provide a brief history of financial regulation in the USA. I use a monetary history of the USA to motivate a search and matching model of transition from commodity money to fiat. I provide a theoretical underpinning to the fact that monetary history is a history of commodity money. I extend my model to consider convertible money, oligarchy, two currencies, money and credit, and Aztec money.
Using social network analysis for civil infrastructure management
([Mississippi State University], 2015) Vechan, Eric; Truax, Dennis D.; El-adaway, Islam H.
It is essential to build, maintain, and use our transportation systems in a manner that meets our current needs while addressing the social and economic needs of future generations. In today’s world, transportation congestion causes serious negative impacts to our societies. To this end, researchers have been utilizing various statistical methods to better study the flow of traffic into the road networks. However, these valuable studies cannot realize their true potential without solid in-depth understanding of the connectivity between the various traffic intersections. This paper bridges the gap between the engineering and social science domains. To this end, the authors propose a dynamic social network analysis framework to study the centrality of the existing road networks. This approach utilizes the field of network analysis where: (1) visualization and modeling techniques allow capturing the relationships, interactions, and attributes of and between network constituents, and (2) mathematical measurements facilitate analyzing quantitative relationships within the network. Connectivity and the importance of each intersection within the network will be understood using this method. The author conducted social network analysis modeling using three studies in Louisiana and two studies in Mississippi. Four types of centrality analysis were performed to identify the most central and important intersections within each study area. Results indicate intersection social network analysis modeling aligns with current congestion studies and transportation planning decisions.
Essays on development economics and industrial organization
([Boston University], 2015) Young, Nathaniel; Mookherjee, Dilip
This dissertation studies two disparate topics in development economics and industrial organization respectively: (a) the role of financial intermediation in promoting economic growth in developing countries and (b) the effects of learning on agents' search behavior. The first essay investigates the effects of commercial banking on economic growth. The tendency of banks to locate in profitable areas experiencing higher growth typically complicates the identification of banking effects. I exploit a previously unstudied reform of bank branching policy in India between 2005-06 that led to a large expansion in private bank credit to financially underserved areas. Using iterations of a regression discontinuity design, I trace the exogenous expansion of banking services through time at the district level. I show this expansion produced positive effects in agriculture and manufacturing. I confirm greater gains in local GDP growth using remote sensing data to overcome the lack of official GDP statistics at the district level. These results offer evidence of a causal impact of financial system expansion on economic development. The second essay examines how the geographic reach of a bank's network of branches can affect its ability to spread risks across spatially separated regions. I investigate the causal impact of the spatial expansion of Indian banks resulting from the bank branching policy reform on smoothing the consumption of households with respect to local weather and agricultural productivity shocks. The third essay (coauthored with Sergei Koulayev) extends a model of sequential search for differentiated goods by relaxing the standard assumption of rational expectations. Agents are likely to refine their imperfect knowledge of product markets while searching. By introducing Bayesian learning into agents' beliefs, the model better replicates important aspects of search behavior. Using data from a popular internet hotel search site, we estimate lower median search costs in the model with Bayesian learning. Considering a counterfactual in which the first page of search results present the most popular hotel options, we estimate an increase in the number of successful searches.
Essays in commodities and firms
([Vanderbilt University], 2015) Gao, Yuanzhi; Crucini, Mario J.
Microeconomic factors are getting more attention by macro economists as potential indicators and driving forces of macroeconomic conditions. In the first chapter, I employ a modified version of the long run risk model and am able to decompose both return premia and volatilities of individual commodities into three distinctive macro components. Results show that the long run risk component from economic fundamentals is the most dominant for most commodities, especially for resource commodities. Uncertainty from stochastic long run volatility is particularly important for worst performing commodities. Chapter 2 utilizes the decomposition results and proposes a new structural approach to better forecast individual commodity prices and returns in one unified framework. The LR can be forecasted by non-stationary latent dynamic factors estimated with information from equity markets and the SR is well predicted by the past performance. Combined forecast shows improvement in performance by reducing MSFE from about 10% to up to 60%. Chapter 3 looks at product differentiation in the aviation industry and tries to determine the importance of it on aggregate market shares. By using micro data from both legacy carriers as well as low-cost carriers in mid-sized US markets with a random-coefficient logit model setup, I find customers with Frequent Flier Program affiliations are less likely to switch to direct flight products offered by competitors, giving legacy carriers bigger market shares than predicted by similar studies.
Economics as an experimental science : using field experiments to test models of economic behavior
([University of Michigan], 2015) Kerwin, Jason Theodore
Economics is limited by the fact that it is not an experimental science: our ability to experimentally test models of economic behavior is constrained by logistics and ethics. However, this view has been reshaped by the credibility revolution of the last two decades and the recent growth of randomized trials in developing countries, which have shown that many economic models can indeed be tested experimentally. Critics of this movement claim that experimental and quasi-experimental results do not generalize, and that such studies focus on convenient rather than important topics. It is possible to overcome this critique by running so-called "mechanism experiments" that are designed to test economic models. Economic theory can also help uncover the drivers of specific results, shedding light on whether they will generalize to other settings and why. This approach can address topics that are not directly amenable to experimentation, by running experiments that capture the same theoretical object in another context. This dissertation applies this approach to three first-order questions in development economics. The first chapter reassesses the standard economic model of risk compensation, which assumes that increases in risk cause people to become more careful. I show that risk-seeking, or fatalistic, behavior, can also be rational. I then use a randomized experiment to show that some southern Malawians respond fatalistically to HIV risks. The second chapter, written with Lasse Brune, examines how random variations in income timing affect expenditure and savings in southern Malawi. We show that lump-sum payments lead to increased savings, but, contrary to existing theoretical work and empirical evidence from developed countries, we find no evidence that exposure to tempting goods affects this result. The third chapter, written with Rebecca Thornton, studies a literacy program in Northern Uganda. When implemented at full cost, the program strongly improves learning. A reduced-cost version of the program also improves learning, but only for the most basic reading and writing skills – and actually harms the development of advanced writing skills. Our results cast doubt on typical cost-effectiveness calculations: the cheaper version is more cost-effective for basic skills, but the opposite is true for overall learning.

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