| 1. |
- Hansen, Niels-Jakob Harbo, 1985-
(författare)
-
Jobs, Unemployment, and Macroeconomic Transmission
- 2016
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Measuring Job Openings: Evidence from Swedish Plant Level Data. In modern macroeconomic models “job openings'' are a key component. Thus, when taking these models to the data we need an empirical counterpart to the theoretical concept of job openings. To achieve this, the literature relies on job vacancies measured either in survey or register data. Insofar as this concept captures the concept of job openings well we should see a tight relationship between vacancies and subsequent hires on the micro level. To investigate this, I analyze a new data set of Swedish hires and job vacancies on the plant level covering the period 2001-2012. I find that vacancies contain little power in predicting hires over and above (i) whether the number of vacancies is positive and (ii) plant size. Building on this, I propose an alternative measure of job openings in the economy. This measure (i) better predicts hiring at the plant level and (ii) provides a better fitting aggregate matching function vis-à-vis the traditional vacancy measure.Firm Level Evidence from Two Vacancy Measures. Using firm level survey and register data for both Sweden and Denmark we show systematic mis-measurement in both vacancy measures. While the register-based measure on the aggregate constitutes a quarter of the survey-based measure, the latter is not a super-set of the former. To obtain the full set of unique vacancies in these two databases, the number of survey vacancies should be multiplied by approximately 1.2. Importantly, this adjustment factor varies over time and across firm characteristics. Our findings have implications for both the search-matching literature and policy analysis based on vacancy measures: observed changes in vacancies can be an outcome of changes in mis-measurement, and are not necessarily changes in the actual number of vacancies.Swedish Unemployment Dynamics. We study the contribution of different labor market flows to business cycle variations in unemployment in the context of a dual labor market. To this end, we develop a decomposition method that allows for a distinction between permanent and temporary employment. We also allow for slow convergence to steady state which is characteristic of European labor markets. We apply the method to a new Swedish data set covering the period 1987-2012 and show that the relative contributions of inflows and outflows to/from unemployment are roughly 60/30. The remaining 10\% are due to flows not involving unemployment. Even though temporary contracts only cover 9-11\% of the working age population, variations in flows involving temporary contracts account for 44\% of the variation in unemployment. We also show that the importance of flows involving temporary contracts is likely to be understated if one does not account for non-steady state dynamics.The New Keynesian Transmission Mechanism: A Heterogeneous-Agent Perspective. We argue that a 2-agent version of the standard New Keynesian model---where a ``worker'' receives only labor income and a “capitalist'' only profit income---offers insights about how income inequality affects the monetary transmission mechanism. Under rigid prices, monetary policy affects the distribution of consumption, but it has no effect on output as workers choose not to change their hours worked in response to wage movements. In the corresponding representative-agent model, in contrast, hours do rise after a monetary policy loosening due to a wealth effect on labor supply: profits fall, thus reducing the representative worker's income. If wages are rigid too, however, the monetary transmission mechanism is active and resembles that in the corresponding representative-agent model. Here, workers are not on their labor supply curve and hence respond passively to demand, and profits are procyclical.
|
|
| 2. |
- Almgren, Mattias, 1988-
(författare)
-
Essays on Home Production, Mobility, and Monetary Policy
- 2023
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Allocation of Expenditures and Time over TimeIn the year 2018, the average high skilled single male worked more than 35 hours per week in the market and allocated more than 70 percent of expenditures to services. In the same year, the average low skilled female worked 22 hours per week in the market and allocated around 65 percent of expenditures to services. What might explain these differences at that point in time, and how they have developed over time? In this paper, I compile and analyze data related to time-use and the allocation of expenditures. The dataset that I compile is customized to fit the needs of my companion paper, Home Production, Expenditures, and Time Use, in which I propose and test a theory that includes home production.Home Production, Expenditures, and Time UseI propose a unified analysis of expenditures and time use, via a model in which households can produce services at home. I show that the model, which uses stable homothetic preferences and standard functional forms for home production, can match data for the U.S. about expenditures and time-use, both in the cross-section and the developments over time. For women, changes in social norms were important. Absent changes in social norms, the developments would have been vastly different, both in terms of how they allocated their time and in terms of how expenditures were allocated.It Runs in the Family: Occupational Choice and the Allocation of TalentChildren frequently grow up to work in the same jobs as their parents. Using unique data on worker skills and personality traits, and administrative data on the labor market outcomes of Swedish men, we study how skills and parental background influence occupational choice, intergenerational mobility, and the allocation of talent in the economy. First, we document that sons are disproportionately more likely to follow into the same occupation as their fathers, across all skills and earnings levels. Second, we estimate a general equilibrium Roy model with costly occupational choice and heterogeneous entry barriers depending on parental background. We find that these entry barriers lead to misallocation: Equalizing entry costs across workers leads occupational following to fall by half. This leads to increased intergenerational mobility, with the largest income gains among sons of fathers in the bottom income decile. Third, exploiting structural change in employment in fathers' occupations, difference-in-differences estimates imply that occupational following leads to reduced earnings, concentrated among sons of low-income fathers and those whose skills are misaligned with those of incumbents in their father’s occupation. Our findings suggest that equalizing career opportunities bring equity gains.Monetary Policy and Liquidity Constraints: Evidence from the Euro AreaWe quantify the relationship between the response of output to monetary policy shocks and the share of liquidity constrained households. We do so in the context of the euro area, using a Local Projections Instrumental Variables estimation. We construct an instrument for changes in interest rates from changes in overnight indexed swap rates in a narrow time window around ECB announcements. Monetary policy shocks have heterogeneous effects on output across countries. Using micro data, we show that the elasticity of output to monetary policy shocks is larger in countries that have a larger fraction of households that are liquidity constrained.
|
|
| 3. |
- Azzalini, Gualtiero, 1991-
(författare)
-
Essays on Income Risk, Portfolio Choices and the Macroeconomy
- 2023
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Business cycle asymmetry of earnings pass-throughHow does the firm's role as an insurance provider vary over the business cycle? Using Swedish administrative data, I document that idiosyncratic firm productivity shocks are passed through workers' earnings asymmetrically. In non-recessions, firms are good insurers against negative shocks. In downturns, they pass through a larger share of their shock. Regardless of the state of the economy, instead, positive shocks are mainly passed through when sizeable. I rationalize these findings using a directed search model of the labor market with recursive contracts. Moral hazard risk associated with on-the-job search is key to generating pass-through and the increased risk of firm disaster in recessions is necessary for matching the empirical facts. As the wage growth distribution features procyclical skewness and acyclical variance, the model also suggests a new mechanism for explaining trends in income risk variation over the business cycle. Welfare calculations reveal that workers would be willing to give up a non-negligible share of consumption to avoid this source of uncertainty.Inferring income properties from portfolio choicesTwo main views exist on the nature of the labor income process: according to one, income shocks are very persistent and agents face similar life-cycle profiles - Restricted Income Profiles (RIP); according to the other, income shocks are not very persistent and life-cycle profiles are individual-specific - Heterogeneous Income Profiles (HIP). This paper studies the implications of these two views in a portfolio choice model in order to discover identification restrictions allowing to discern between them. I find that HIP and RIP imply different life-cycle patterns of the participation and conditional risky share choices but similar patterns of consumption and saving. Crucial for this result is the inclusion of cyclical skewness in the stochastic process for income, which enables us to correctly estimate the part of income risk deriving from the persistence of the shocks.Preference heterogeneity and portfolio choices over the wealth distributionWhat are the key elements required in generating portfolio choices over the wealth distribution in line with the data? In this paper, we argue that capturing preference heterogeneity across individuals is one of them. Using a partial equilibrium Bewley-type model with endogenous portfolio choice and cyclical skewness in labor income shocks, we show that heterogeneity in risk aversion, impatience and portfolio diversification is crucial to match the empirical schedules of unconditional risky share, participation and share of idiosyncratic variance in individual portfolios. At the same time, these elements generate dispersion in wealth through their heterogeneous effects on individuals' investment decisions resulting in a cross-sectional wealth distribution that provides a close fit of the data, particularly at the very top.
|
|
| 4. |
- Baltrunaite, Audinga, 1985-
(författare)
-
Political Economics of Special Interests and Gender
- 2016
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Political Finance Reform and Public Procurement: Evidence from Lithuania. Can political donations buy influence? This paper studies whether firms trade political contributions for public procurement contracts. To answer this question, I focus on the Lithuanian political economy. Combining data on a large number of government tenders, the universe of corporate donors and firm characteristics, I examine how a ban on corporate donations affects the awarding of procurement contracts to companies that donated in the past. Consistent with political favoritism, contributing firms’ probability of winning goes down by five percentage points as compared to that of non-donor firms after the ban. Among different mechanisms, the hypothesis that corporate donors get confidential information on competing bids prevails. The empirical results are in line with predictions from a first-price sealed-bid auction model with one informed bidder. Evidence on firm bidding and victory margins suggests that contributing firms adjust their bids in order to secure contracts at a maximum revenue. I assess that tax payers save almost one percent of GDP thanks to the reform.Gender Quotas and the Quality of Politicians. We analyze the effects of the introduction of gender quotas in candidate lists on the quality of elected politicians, as measured by the average number of years of education. We consider an Italian law which introduced gender quotas in local elections in 1993, and was abolished in 1995. As not all municipalities went through elections during this period, we identify two groups of municipalities and use a difference-in-differences estimation. We find that gender quotas are associated with an increase in the quality of elected politicians, with the effect ranging from 0.12 to 0.24 years of education. This effect is due not only to the higher number of elected women, who are on average more educated than men, but also to the lower number of low-educated elected men. The positive effect on quality is confirmed when we measure the latter with alternative indicators, it persists in the long run and it is robust to controlling for political ideology and political competition.Affirmative Action and the Power of the Elderly. There is evidence that age matters in politics. In this article we study whether implementation of affirmative action policies on gender can generate additional effects on an alternative dimension of representation, namely, the age of politicians. We consider an Italian law which introduced gender quotas in candidate lists for local elections in 1993, and was abolished in 1995. As not all municipalities went through elections during this period, we can identify two groups of municipalities and use a difference-in-differences estimation to analyze the effect of gender quotas on the age of elected politicians. We find that gender quotas are associated with election of politicians that are younger by more than one year. The effect occurs mainly due to the reduction in age of elected male politicians and is consistent with the optimizing behavior of parties or of voters.Let the Voters Choose Women. Female under-representation in politics can be the result of parties' selection of candidates and/or of voters’ electoral preferences. To assess the impact of these two channels, we exploit the introduction of Italian Law 215/2013, which prescribes both gender quotas on candidate lists and double preference voting conditioned on gender. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate that the law increases the share of elected female politicians by 22 percentage points. The result is driven by the increase in preference votes cast for female candidates, suggesting a salient role of double preference voting in promoting female empowerment in politics.
|
|
| 5. |
- Björkman, Martina, 1974-
(författare)
-
Essays on Empirical Development Economics: Education, Health and Gender
- 2006
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three empirical essays in development economics on education, health and gender."Income Shocks and Gender Gaps in Education: Evidence from Uganda" uses exogenous variation in rainfall across districts in Uganda to estimate the causal effects of household income shocks on children's enrollment and cognitive skills conditional on gender. Adverse income shocks have large negative effects on female enrollment and test scores, while boys are only marginally affected. The results imply that households respond to income shocks by varying the quantity and quality of girls' education while boys are to a large extent sheltered."Does Money Matter for Student Performance? Evidence from a Grant Program in Uganda" assesses the effect on student performance of an untied public grant in the education sector. To capture the causal effect of the grant, I exploit the variation in program exposure introduced by a newspaper campaign aimed at boosting schools' and parents' ability to monitor local officials' handling of the grant program. The newspaper campaign was successful, but since newspaper penetration varies greatly across districts, the exposure to information about the program, and thus funding, differed across districts. I use this variation to study the effect of increased funding on student test scores and find significant and quantitatively important effects."Power to the People: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment of a Citizen Report Card Project in Uganda" presents the results of a randomized evaluation of a community-based monitoring intervention intended to enhance rural communities' ability to hold primary health care providers accountable. The intervention improved both the quality and the quantity of health service provision in the treatment communities: One year into the program, average utilization increased by 16 percent, the weight of infants increased and the number of deaths among children under-five fell markedly. The results suggest that the health unit staff increased their effort to serve the community in light of better community monitoring.
|
|
| 6. |
- Blix, Mårten
(författare)
-
Rational Expectations and Regime Shifts in Macroeconometrics
- 1997
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three papers. The first two papers explore implications of rational expectations when there is stochastic regime-switching; the third is an independent paper where underlying inflation is defined using rational expectations.Rational Expectations in a VAR with Markov Switching examines how a well known class of rational expectations hypotheses using linear vector-autoregressions (VAR:s) can be extended to allow for unobservable Markov switching between discrete states. This statistical model differs from those commonly used in the literature: the model here is easier to estimate and has the appeal that the state dependence is symmetric. The contribution of the paper is to derive simple expressions for the VAR forecasts under Markov switching; these forecasts are then used to find testable restrictions implied by rational expectations, which are linear when the forecast horizon is infinite. As an illustration, I examine a test of the expectations hypothesis (EH) on the short end of the maturity spectrum - three and six month US bills - and find that a non-rejection of the hypothesis in a previous paper, also with regime shifts, may be fragile.Term Premia Under Switching Regimes uses the methods discussed in the first paper to identify a conditional term premium over the long end of the maturity spectrum for US and Swedish data. Traditional tests of the EH using linear VAR:s have treated the premium as a constant, unexplained deviation from expectations. I use a well known present value model, but introduce a more flexible specification: the premium is assumed to depend on the current state only, thus allowing for different premia across states. Despite using a more flexible model, the EH hypothesis is still statistically rejected; the rejection is not sensitive to small changes in the specification, but the premium is highly sensitive to small changes in the discount factor. Nevertheless, the EH performs well in terms of goodness of fit.Underlying Inflation - A Common Trends Approach uses economic theory based restrictions on a VAR with output and prices to compute underlying inflation. For policy purposes, headline inflation has some undesirable properties, such as being affected by changes in taxes, lack of smoothness, but most importantly, is not consistent with nominal shocks being (exactly) output neutral in the long run. I use an identification scheme proposed in the literature to define underlying inflation as the component of changes in nominal prices which have only transient effect on output, but use a new method to implement the restrictions, which may be simpler to use and interpret. I use this method to calculate core inflation for Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the UK, and the US.
|
|
| 7. |
- Bonfiglioli, Alessandra, 1977-
(författare)
-
Essays on Financial Markets and Macroeconomics
- 2005
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three papers, which address different aspects of financial markets and institutions.Equities and Inequality studies the relationship between investor protection the development of financial markets and income inequality. In the presence of market frictions, investor protection promotes financial development by raising confidence and reducing the costs of external financing. Developed financial systems spread risks among financiers and firms, allocating them to the agents bearing them the best. Therefore, financial development plays the twofold role of encouraging agents to undertake risky enterprises and providing them with insurance. By increasing the number of risky projects, it raises income inequality. By extending insurance to more agents, it reduces it. As a result, the relationship between financial development and income inequality is hump-shaped. Empirical evidence from a cross-section of sixty-nine countries, as well as a panel of fifty-two countries over the period 1976-2000, supports the predictions of the model.How Does Financial Liberalization Affect Economic Growth? assesses the effects of international financial liberalization and banking crises on investments and productivity in a sample of 93 countries (at its largest) observed between 1975 and 1999. I provide empirical evidence that financial liberalization spurs productivity growth and marginally affects capital accumulation. Banking crises depress both investments and TFP. Both levels and growth rates of productivity respond to financial liberalization and banking crises. The paper also presents evidence of conditional convergence in productivity across countries. However, the speed of convergence is unaffected by financial liberalization. These results are robust to a number of econometric specifications.Explaining Co-movements Between Stock Markets: US and Germany explains co-movements between stock markets by explicitly considering the distinction between interdependence and contagion. It proposes and implements a full information approach on data for US and Germany to provide answers to the following questions: (i) is there long-term interdependence between US and German stock markets? (ii) Is there short-term interdependence and contagion between US and German stock markets, i.e. do short-term fluctuations of the US share prices spill over to German share prices and is such co-movement unstable over high volatility episodes? The answers are no to the former and yes to the latter.
|
|
| 8. |
- Caldara, Dario, 1982-
(författare)
-
Essays on Empirical Macroeconomics
- 2011
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four essays in empirical macroeconomics. What Are the Effects of Fiscal Policy Shocks? A VAR-Based Comparative Analysis The literature using structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) to assess the effects of fiscal policy shocks strongly disagrees on the qualitative and quantitative response of key macroeconomic variables. We find that controlling for differences in specification of the reduced-form model, all identification approaches used in the literature yield similar results regarding the effects of government spending shocks, but diverging results regarding the effects of tax shocks. The Analytics of SVARs. A Unified Framework to Measure Fiscal Multipliers Does fiscal policy stimulate output? SVARs have been used to address this question, but no stylized facts have emerged. I show that different priors about the output elasticities of tax revenue and government expenditures implied by the identification schemes generate a large dispersion in the estimates of tax and spending multipliers. I estimate fiscal multipliers consistent with prior distributions of the elasticities computed by a variety of empirical strategies. I document that in the U.S. spending multipliers are larger than the tax multipliers. Computing DSGE Models with Recursive Preferences and Stochastic Volatility This paper compares solution methods for computing the equilibrium of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with recursive preferences and stochastic volatility. The main finding is that a third-order perturbation is competitive in terms of accuracy with Chebyshev polynomials and value function iteration, while being an order of magnitude faster to run. Business Cycle Accounting and Misspecified DSGE Models This paper investigates how insights from the literature on business cycle accounting can be used to trace out the implications of missing channels in a baseline estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model used for forecast and policy analysis.
|
|
| 9. |
- Campa, Pamela, 1983-
(författare)
-
Media Influence on Pollution, and Gender Equality
- 2013
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three essays.The first essay, "Press and Leaks: Do Newspapers Reduce Toxic Emissions?", uses data on plant-level emissions in 2001-2009 from the Toxic Release Inventory of the US Environmental Protection Agency, coupled with data on location and content of newspapers, to investigate whether media coverage induces firms to reduce toxic emissions. The results show that an increase in Newspapers Density, that is the number of newspapers nearby the plant, raises the press coverage of the plant's toxic emissions and reduces the amount of these emissions. This association is larger in industries exposed to consumer pressure and in counties subjected to extreme negative health outcomes.The second essay, "Gender Quotas, Female Politicians and Public Expenditures: Quasi-Experimental Evidence", estimates the effect of gender quotas on the election of female politicians and on public finance decisions in Spanish municipalities, using a Before-After Regression Discontinuity Design. Gender quotas have increased the percentage of female candidates and also, but to a lower extent, the percentage of female councilors. The difference between the two effects is due to the strategic positioning of candidates within lists. The effect of quotas on the election of female mayors and on the size and composition of municipal expenditures is not statistically different from zero.The third essay, "Are attitudes endogenous to political regimes? Beliefs about working women in state-socialist countries", studies whether individual beliefs about gender roles are endogenous to political regimes, using a Difference-in-Differences analysis. The results suggest a significant difference in the evolution of attitudes towards gender roles between Europeans in state-socialist countries and other Europeans during the period 1947-1991. Central and Eastern Europeans who formed their attitudes during state socialism seem more likely to hold progressive beliefs regarding working women.
|
|
| 10. |
- Cocciolo, Serena, 1987-
(författare)
-
Participatory Governance and Public Service Provision
- 2019
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How do Community Contribution Requirements Affect Local Public Good Provision? Experimental Evidence from Safe Water Sources in Bangladesh We exploit the random assignment of communities selected to receive a safe drinking water program to various contribution requirements: cash, labor or no requirement to contribute. Imposing a cash contribution requirement greatly decreases program take-up, while imposing a labour contribution does not. Program impact is correspondingly lower under the cash contribution requirement than under the labour contribution requirement or contribution waiver. The cash contribution requirement screens out communities with low arsenic contamination, but screening does not lead to increased treatment effects on the treated. Our results suggest that there are substantial welfare gains to be made in such projects in poor communities by allowing households to contribute in labour rather than cash.
|
|
