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- Johansson, Lars M., 1963-
(författare)
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Studies of the relationship between aid and trade and the fiscal implications of emigration and HIV/AIDS interventions
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three studies; two on fiscal effects of demographic change and one on the correlation between international aid and trade flows. Fiscal Implications of Emigration. This study examines the fiscal effects of emigration. A dynamic macroeconomic framework is used. The net present value of the fiscal effects of different types of individuals' emigration decisions is calculated. Individuals are differentiated with relation to age, gender, education, being immigrants or born in Sweden and how long they choose to stay abroad in case of emigration. The study explores how the fiscal effects of emigration are contingent on these different personal characteristics and it is applied to the case of emigration from Sweden in 1998. The estimated aggregate fiscal cost is 0.62% of GDP. This cost is significantly larger than the cost of immigration. Fiscal Implications of AIDS in South Africa. In this paper, I study the fiscal implications of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa in a standard neoclassical growth model. I find that an antiretroviral program is to a large extent self financing. An improvement in dependency ratios and health care cost savings would pay for Rand 144 billion of a full epidemiological intervention. The indirect effect through the changing demographic structure will be more important than the direct health care cost saving effect. Tied Aid, Trade-Facilitating Aid or Trade-Diverting Aid? Donor aid is often regarded as being informally tied (aid increases donor-recipient exports). However, in this paper, using a gravity model, we show that aid is also positively associated with recipient-donor exports. That is, aid increases bilateral trade flows in both directions. Our interpretation is that an intensified aid relation reduces the effective cost of geographic distance. We find a particularly strong relation between aid in the form of technical assistance and exports in both directions.
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| 2. |
- Shifa, Abdulaziz B., 1980-
(författare)
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Essays on Growth, Political Economy and Development
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis has three self-contained articles.Economic growth and trade in human capital: A salient empirical pattern in the East Asian “miracle” is a large increase in output and factor accumulation despite only a modest increase in TFP. I develop and calibrate a model of growth and catch-up to provide a possible explanation. A novel element of the model is a globalized education market allowing human capital transfer from frontier to developing economies – an assumption motivated by the experience of countries like Korea and Taiwan where domestic universities employed graduates of Western universities to provide advanced training.The political economy of urban bias in dictatorial regimes. In many developing countries, public resource allocation is often biased against the rural population – a policy that hurts the vast majority of the poor living in rural areas. This paper develops a dynamic political economy model of urban bias in a dictatorial regime. A novel result of the model is that urban bias can emerge in predominantly agrarian economies even if there is no bias in political power toward urban residents. The empirical evidence from a recently compiled country-level panel dataset on agricultural taxes/subsidies is consistent with the prediction of the model.Does agricultural growth cause manufacturing growth? Empirically assessing the impact of agricultural growth on manufacturing growth is challenging because of endogeneity concerns. This paper attempts to circumvent the identification challenge by using weather variations to instrument for agricultural growth. The IV estimations show that agricultural growth has a significant positive impact on manufacturing growth, and it is larger than the OLS estimates. I discuss the empirical implications for agricultural policies, efficiency of the manufacturing sector, and for the role of agricultural growth in Africa's industrialization.
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| 3. |
- Malafry, Laurence, 1982-
(författare)
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Inequality and Macroeconomic Policy : Essays on Climate, Immigration and Fiscal Intervention
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays in economics.Optimal Climate Policy with Household Wealth Inequality. Policy makers concerned with setting optimal carbon taxes to address climate change externalities often employ integrated assessment models (IAMs). While these models differ on their assumptions of climate damage impacts, discounting and technology, they conform on their assumption of complete markets and a representative household. In the face of global inequality and significant vulnerability of asset poor households, I relax the complete markets assumption and introduce a realistic degree of global household inequality. A simple experiment of introducing a range of global carbon taxes shows a household's position on the global wealth distribution predicts the identity of their most preferred carbon price.Immigration Shocks, Equilibrium Unemployment and Inequality. The purpose of this paper is to present a proof-of-concept model for assessing the impact of immigration shocks on a country's equilibrium unemployment, wages and inequality. The model implements labour market matching in the workhorse heterogeneous agent macro model with precautionary savings. In this setting, I perform several transition experiments exploring the channels and mechanisms through which a substantial immigration shock affects macroeconomic outcomes, including conditional welfare and economic integration. I find that the identity of the immigration cohort, as well as, features of the receiving economy matter for both the magnitude and direction of the response.Fiscal Multipliers in the 21st Century. Fiscal multipliers appear to vary greatly over time and space. Based on VARs for a large number of countries, we document a strong correlation between wealth inequality and the magnitude of fiscal multipliers. In an attempt to account for this finding, we develop a life-cycle, overlapping-generations economy with uninsurable labor market risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of a number of OECD economies, including the distribution of wages and wealth, social security, taxes, and government debt and study how a fiscal multiplier depends on various country characteristics. We find that the fiscal multiplier is highly sensitive to the fraction of the population who face binding credit constraints and also to the average wealth level in the economy. These findings together help us generate a cross-country pattern of multipliers that is quite similar to that in the data.Fiscal Consolidation Programs and Income Inequality. Following the Great Recession, many European countries implemented fiscal consolidation policies aimed at reducing government debt. Using three different empirical approaches, we document a strong positive relationship between higher income inequality and stronger recessive impacts of fiscal consolidation. To explain this finding, we develop a life-cycle, overlapping generations economy with uninsurable labor market risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of a number of European economies, including the distribution of wages and wealth, and study the effects of fiscal consolidation programs. We find that higher income risk induces precautionary savings behavior, which decreases the proportion of credit-constrained agents in the economy. Our model produces a cross-country correlation between inequality and the fiscal consolidation multipliers in line with the data.
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