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Erschen, Paul Edmund. "Three essays." The Ohio State University, 2000. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1327512591.
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Pham, Tu-Lam. "Three Essays on Microeconomics." Diss., lmu, 2009. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-97803.
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Zhang, Feng. "Three Essays in Finance." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/36446.
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This dissertation contains three studies.
Chapter 2 investigates interactions between antitakeover provisions and managerial ownership, two corporate governance mechanisms. Antitakeover provisions weaken the incentive effect of managerial ownership and magnify its entrenchment effect, and thus will decrease the effect of managerial ownership on firm value. I show that the
value effect of managerial ownership crucially depends on the strength of antitakeover provisions. For firms with weak antitakeover provisions, managerial ownership enhances firm value, unless managers have very high ownership. For firms with strong antitakeover provisions, however, increasing managerial ownership always destroys firm value. Also, managerial ownership significantly decreases with the strength of antitakeover provisions. These findings support the hypotheses that antitakeover provisions decrease the value effect of managerial ownership and affect managers' compensation contract.
Chapter 3 proposes a model to investigate the role of information
precision in IPO pricing. The model shows that more precise information will exert more influence on the offer price. In strong support of the model, I find that the proportion of the industry return during the waiting period that is incorporated into the offer price increases with a proxy for precision of the industry return as a measure of the change in the IPO firm's value during the waiting period. This study enhances our understanding of the partial adjustment phenomenon: noisy information will be partially incorporated into the offer price.
Chapter 4 shows that young male CEOs appear to be combative: they are
four percent more likely to be acquisitive and, having initiated an acquisition, they are over 20 percent more likely to withdraw an offer. Furthermore, a young target male CEO is
two percent more likely to force a bidder to resort to a tender offer. We argue that this combative nature is a result of testosterone levels that are higher in young males. Testosterone is a hormone associated with male dominance seeking. The acts of attempting or resisting an acquisition can be viewed as striving to achieve dominance. We argue that the evidence reported in this paper is consistent with the presence of a significant
hormone effect in M&As.
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Mazzotta, Stefano. "Three essays on volatility." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=85189.
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This dissertation is in the form of one survey paper and three essays on the topic of volatility. The unifying feature that permeates the entire thesis is the focus on the measurement and use of conditional second moment of equities and currencies as a measure of risk for asset pricing and policy purposes in the context of international markets.<br>The survey examines selected papers from the international finance literature and from the volatility literature with a focus on the theoretical and empirical relationship between first and second unconditional and conditional moments of domestic and international asset returns. It then specifically proposes several areas for investigation related to international finance topics. The first essay investigates the importance of asymmetric volatility when computing the risk premium of international assets. The results indicate that conditional second moment asymmetry is significant and time-varying. They also show that, if the price of risk is time-varying, the world market and foreign exchange risk premia estimated without allowing for time-varying asymmetry are less consistent with the data. Furthermore, they imply that asymmetry is more pronounced when the business condition is such that investors require higher compensation to bear risk.<br>In the second essay we start from the consideration that financial decision makers often consider the information in currency option valuations when making assessments about future exchange rates. The purpose of this essay is then to systematically assess the quality of option based volatility, interval and density forecasts. We use a unique dataset consisting of over 10 years of daily data on over-the-counter currency option prices. We find that the implied volatilities explain a large share of the variation in realized volatility. Finally, we find that wide-range interval and density forecasts are often misspecified whereas narrow-range interval forecasts are well specified.<br>In the third essay we examine whether the information contained in various measures of correlation among exchange rates can be used to assess future currency co-movement. We compare option-implied correlation forecasts from a dataset consisting of over 10 years of daily data on over-the-counter currency option prices to a set of return-based correlation measures and assess the relative quality of the correlation forecasts. We find that while the predictive power of implied correlation is not always superior to that of returns based correlations measures, it tends to provide the most consistent results across currencies. Predictions that use both implied and returns-based correlations generate the highest adjusted R2's, explaining up to 42 per cent of the realized correlations.
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Schwabish, Jonathan A. Knicsner Thomas. "Three essays in inequality." Related Electronic Resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
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Albiol-Sanchez, Judit. "Three essays on entrepreneurship." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/308122.
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El tema de l’emprenedoria com un camp d'investigació és àmpliament reconegut i s'ha afirmat com un important motor de creixement econòmic. Aquesta tesi doctoral consisteix en tres assaigs centrats en l'anàlisi de l'emprenedoria. L'ús de diferents bases de dades i l’aplicació de diferents tècniques metodològiques, tant en el macroeconòmic com a nivell microeconòmic, enriqueix aquesta tesi ja que permet analitzar l’emprenedoria des de diferents punts de vista i ens permet analitzar el fenòmen amb més detall. En particular, aquesta tesi aporta noves evidències sobre tres grans temes: el comportament dinàmic de les taxes empresarials; l'autoocupació com una forma d'escapar del desajust de competències i habilitats al lloc de treball i; l'impacte de les petites empreses en comparació amb les grans empreses en el creixement econòmic.
Els resultats del primer assaig indiquen un impacte positiu de les sortides empresarials en els nivells futurs d’emprenedoria en un país, sent l’efecte major per a emprenedors d’oportunitat. Els resultats mostren algunes implicacions importants per als investigadors i els responsables de les polítiques, atès que la sortida de negocis pot ser superada quan hi ha una motivació necessitat.
Els resultats del segon assaig ens indiquen que no només els auto-empleats són menys probable de declarar tenir desajust de competències i habilitats sinó també que aquells individus que realitzen la transició des de l'ocupació assalariada a l'autoocupació redueixen la seva probabilitat d'inadequació de les qualificacions i competències després d’haver fet la transició.
Els resultats del tercer assaig suggereixen que, de mitjana, la participació de les micro i grans empreses pot haver estat ‘per sobre de l’òptim’ (sobretot en els països d'ingressos més baixos de la UE), mentre que la proporció d'empreses mitjanes poden haver estat ‘sota de l'òptim’ (sobretot en països de majors ingressos de la UE).<br>El tema del emprendimiento como un campo de investigación es ampliamente reconocido y se ha afirmado como un importante motor de crecimiento económico. Esta tesis doctoral consiste en tres ensayos centrados en el análisis de la emprendeduría. El uso de diferentes bases de datos y la aplicación de diferentes técnicas metodológicas, tanto en el macroeconómico como a nivel microeconómico, enriquece esta tesis ya que permite analizar el emprendimiento desde diferentes puntos de vista y con más detalle. En particular, esta tesis aporta nuevas evidencias sobre tres grandes temas: el comportamiento dinámico de las tasas empresariales; el autoempleo como una forma de escapar del desajuste de competencias y habilidades en el lugar de trabajo y; el impacto de las pequeñas empresas en comparación con las grandes en el crecimiento económico.
Los resultados del primer ensayo indican un impacto positivo de las salidas empresariales en los futuros niveles de emprendimiento en un país, siendo el efecto mayor para emprendedores de oportunidad. Los resultados muestran algunas implicaciones importantes para los investigadores y los responsables de las políticas, dado que la salida de negocios puede ser superada cuando hay una motivación por necesidad.
Los resultados del segundo ensayo nos indican que no sólo los auto-empleados son menos probable que declaren tener desajuste de competencias sino también que aquellos individuos que realizan la transición desde el empleo asalariado al autoempleo reducen su probabilidad de inadecuación de las cualificaciones y competencias después de haber hecho la transición.
Los resultados del tercer ensayo sugieren que, en promedio, la participación de las micro y grandes empresas puede haber estado 'por encima del óptimo' (sobre todo en los países de ingresos más bajos de la UE), mientras que la proporción de empresas medianas pueden haber estado 'debajo del óptimo' (sobre todo en países de mayores ingresos de la UE).<br>The topic of entrepreneurship as a field of research is widely recognised and it has been claimed as a major driver of economic growth. This doctoral thesis consists of three essays focused on the analysis of entrepreneurship. The use of different databases and the application of different methodological techniques, both at macroeconomic and at microeconomic levels, enriches this thesis by approaching the entrepreneurial activity from different points of view and allow us to analyse the phenomenon much deeper. In particular, this thesis provides new evidence on three broad issues: the dynamic behavior of entrepreneurial rates; self-employment as a way to escape from skill mismatches and; the impact of small versus large firms on economic performance.
The results of the first essay indicate that exits have a positive impact on future levels of entrepreneurial activity in a country, being this effect higher for opportunity entrepreneurs. The results show some important implications for researchers and policy makers given that business exit may be overcome when there is a necessity motivation.
The results of the second essay that not only the average self-employee is less likely to declare being skill-mismatched but also that those individuals who transit from salaried employment to self-employment reduce their probability of skill mismatches after the transition.
The results of the third essay suggest that, on average, the share of micro and large firms may have been ‘above optimum’ (particularly in lower income EU countries) whereas the share of medium-sized firms may have been ‘below optimum’ (particularly in higher income EU countries).
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Golez, Benjamin. "Three Essays in Finance." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/31881.
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This thesis consists of three essays. In the first essay, I show that information about dividends implied in derivative markets predicts future dividend growth and thereby improves the forecasts of short-run returns on the aggregate market. In the second essay, we analyze the impact of options trading on the price distribution of the underlying asset. Specifically, we show that S&P 500 futures finish in the proximity of the closest strike price on days when options on S&P 500 futures expire. We document that this effect is mainly driven by the rebalancing of delta hedges of the market maker. In the third essay, we develop a theory of price support in security markets that arises from conflict of interests, and we test our hypothesis in the context of the Spanish mutual fund industry. In particular, we analyze how bank-affiliated mutual funds trade in the stock of the parent bank and show that, consistently with the price support hypothesis, affiliated mutual funds tend to increase their holdings of the parent bank’s stock following a large drop in its price.<br>Esta tesis consta de tres capítulos. En el primer capítulo, muestro que la información sobre dividendos implícita en los mercados de derivados predice el crecimiento futuro de los dividendos, mejorando así las predicciones de los rendimientos a corto plazo en el mercado agregado. En el segundo capítulo, analizamos el impacto de la compraventa de opciones en la distribución del precio del activo subyacente. En concreto, mostramos que los futuros del S&P 500 terminan en el entorno del precio de ejercicio más próximo en los días en que las opciones sobre los futuros del S&P 500 expiran. Documentamos que este efecto está principalmente motivado por el reajuste de la cobertura delta de los intermediarios. En el tercer capítulo, desarrollamos una teoría de sostenimiento de precios en los mercados de valores motivado por un conflicto de intereses y testamos nuestra hipótesis en el contexto de la industria española de fondos de inversión. En concreto, analizamos cómo los fondos de inversión afiliados a un banco operan las acciones del banco matriz y mostramos que, consecuentemente con la hipótesis del sostenimiento de precios, los fondos de inversión filiales tienden a incrementar sus posiciones en las acciones del banco matriz después de una caída importante de su cotización.
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Mordel, Adi Mason Joseph. "Three essays on securitization /." Philadelphia, Pa. : Drexel University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1860/3258.
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Tilson, Vera. "Three essays in operations." online version, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=case1147968123.
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Asem, Ebenezer. "Three essays on seigniorage." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq21547.pdf.
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Johnson, Paul. "Three essays on collusion." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape3/PQDD_0024/NQ48775.pdf.
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Smith, Claudia A. "Three essays on immigration." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/login?COPT=REJTPTU0NWQmSU5UPTAmVkVSPTI=&clientId=3739.
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Qiao, Xue. "Three essays in macroeconomics." [Ames, Iowa : Iowa State University], 2007.
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Sarkisyan, Anna. "Three essays on securitisation." Thesis, City University London, 2011. http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1171/.
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Securitisation has been viewed as a key bank funding, risk management and performance improvement tool over the last two decades. However, the financial crisis of 2007-2009 has shown that engagement in securitisation might create significant financial problems for banks and consequently lead to widespread problems in the financial sector. This, therefore, has underlined the importance of understanding banks’ securitisation activities, the benefits and risks inherent, and the consequences for the financial system. This thesis comprises empirical research on the effects of securitisation on banks. The work is presented in three essays. The first essay investigates whether banks improve their performance through the use of the securitisation market by applying a propensity score matching approach. Specifically, we attempt to assess whether the access to the securitisation market led to lower cost of funding, less credit risk exposure, and higher profitability. Using US commercial bank data from 2001 to 2008, we first test these hypotheses using univariate analysis and find that securitising banks are, on average, more profitable institutions, with higher credit risk exposure, and higher cost of funding. However, the propensity score matching analysis does not provide evidence to suggest that securitisation had a significant impact upon bank performance. In other words, the analysis shows that securitisers would have had comparable cost of funding, credit risk, and profitability had they remained non-securitising. This evidence leads us to conclude that securitisation does not seem to outperform alternative funding, risk management, and profitability improvement techniques used by non-securitising banks that have ex-ante similar characteristics to those securitising. The second essay investigates the impact of securitisation on the credit-risk taking behaviour of banks. Using US bank holding company data from 2001 to 2007, we find that banks with a greater balance of outstanding securitised assets choose asset portfolios of lower credit risk. Examining securitisations by the type of underlying assets, we find that the negative relationship between outstanding securitisation and risk taking is primarily driven by securitisations of mortgages, home equity lines of credit, and other consumer loans. Securitisations of all other types of assets, on the other hand, seem to have no significant impact on bank credit-risk taking behaviour. We attribute these results to the recourse commonly provided in securitisation transactions, as it might alter the risk-taking appetite of the issuing banks across asset classes. Therefore, we conclude that the net impact of securitisation on the riskiness of issuing banks, and consequently on the soundness of the banking system, is ambiguous and will depend on the structure of transactions. In particular, it will depend on the relative magnitude of credit support provided by banks. The third essay examines the relationship between banks’ off-balance sheet securitisation structures and insolvency risk, with a particular focus on credit and liquidity support provided by these banks. Additionally, it examines the risk effect of credit-enhancing facilities and liquidity commitments provided by banks to securitisation structures of other institutions. Using US bank holding company data for the period from 2002 to 2007, we first find that credit enhancements provided by originating banks in their securitisation structures have a significant positive effect on insolvency risk of the banks. Second, examining credit enhancements by the form of underlying facility, we find that among credit-enhancing interest-only strips, subordinated securities, and standby letters of credit, the latter have the greatest positive association with bank insolvency risk. In contrast, liquidity provisions are found to have a significant risk-reducing effect. Finally, examining credit and liquidity support provided by banks to third-party securitisation structures, we find that credit enhancing third-party securitisations reduces insolvency risk of the banks, while liquidity provisions are found to be highly positively associated with their insolvency. Summarising the main findings, the first essay finds no evidence of significant causal effects of securitisation on performance of securitising banks. The second essay finds evidence to suggest that outstanding securitisation has a negative impact on the credit-risk taking behaviour of banks; while the third essay finds that the interests retained by banks in connection to securitised assets significantly increase their insolvency risk. This shows that the net risk transfer for originating banks through securitisation might be ambiguous; however banks do account for the retained exposure to the securitised assets reducing credit risk taking. Taken together, the evidence from the three studies suggests that banks predominantly use securitisation for financing purposes rather than as a risk management or performance improvement mechanism. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the motives for and consequent implications of securitisation and provides valuable findings for the ongoing discussion of how to redesign the securitisation model and to reform the supervision and regulation of banks’ engagement in securitisation activities in response to the recent financial crisis.
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Hong, Xin. "THREE ESSAYS ON INVESTMENTS." UKnowledge, 2014. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/finance_etds/2.
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This dissertation consists of three essays on investments. The first essay examines the incidence, determinants, and consequences of hedge fund share restriction changes. This paper finds that nearly one in five hedge funds change their share restrictions (e.g., lockup) over the period of 2007-2012. Share restriction changes are not random. Fund’s asset illiquidity, liquidity risk, and performance are related to share restriction changes. A hazard model indicates that funds who actively manage liquidity concerns live longer by adjusting share restrictions. The paper examines whether changes in share restrictions create an endogeneity bias in the share illiquidity premium (Aragon, 2007) and find that 18% of the premium can be explained by the dynamic nature of contract changes.
The second essay examines why mutual funds appear to underperform hedge funds. Utilizing a unique panel of mutual fund contracts changes, this paper explores several possible channels, including: alternative investment practices (e.g., short sales and leverage), performance-based compensation, and the ability to restrict the funding risk of fund flows. This paper documents that over our sample period, mutual funds were more likely to shift their contracting environment closer to that of hedge funds. However, this shift provided no benefit to mutual funds and the paper finds no causal link between these contract changes and improvements in performance. Rather, this paper casts doubt on the binding nature of investment restrictions in the mutual fund industry.
The third essay examines whether the 52-week high effect (George and Hwang, 2004) can be explained by risk factors. The paper finds that it is more consistent with investor underreaction caused by anchoring bias: the presumably more sophisticated institutional investors suffer less from this bias and buy (sell) stocks close to (far from) their 52-week highs. Further, the effect is mainly driven by investor underreaction to industry instead of firm-specific information. The 52-week high strategy works best among stocks whose values are more affected by industry factors. The 52-week high strategy based on industry measurement is more profitable than the one based on idiosyncratic measurement.
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Zeng, Shutian. "Three Essays in Macroeconomics." Research Showcase @ CMU, 2015. http://repository.cmu.edu/dissertations/508.
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The first chapter argues that the countercyclical workforce occupational mobility could be caused by aggregate economic fluctuations, as a result, the workforce composition shifts over business cycle, which in turn can affect how the economy recovers from recession. Using the Current Population Survey, I find: a) workers were more likely to separate from their occupations during last two recessions, b) the deteriorated economic conditions during last recession significantly reduced the average productivity change upon occupation switch, which suggests the additional occupation switches were triggered by worsened economic conditions. To demonstrate how workforce composition could play a role in business cycle, I calibrate a model with aggregate TFP, occupational productivity, match quality and increasing productivity in occupational tenure. Workers can be separated endogenously from current occupation due to low continuation value for the rm. Aggregate TFP shifts the threshold of endogenous separation, and less productive workers are red first in a recession, leaving workers who are in expanding occupations, have better match quality or longer occupational tenure in the workforce. The output recovers faster than the labor market because newly hired workers tend to concentrate in expanding occupations and have better match quality than before. The model is able to generate faster output recovery, slow labor market recovery after a recession and countercyclical endogenous occupation mobility rate. The result suggests that other than the total amount of labor input, the workforce composition change could also plays an important role in real business cycle and this channel shall be explored more in the future. The second chapter, co-authored with Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau and Etienne Wasmer, studies the shopping time over business cycle. Renewed interest in macroeconomic theories of search frictions in the goods market requires a deeper understanding of the cyclical properties of the intensive margins in this market. Using the American Time Use Survey we construct a shopping time indicator, both searching and purchasing goods, based on 25 time use categories (out of more than 400 time use categories). We find that average time spent shopping declined in the aggregate over the period 2008-2010 compared to 2005-2007. The decline was largest for the unemployed who went from spending more time shopping for goods than the employed to roughly the same, or even less, time. Cross-state and individual regressions indicate procyclical consumer shopping in the goods market, and refute models in which price comparisons are a driver of business cycles. The third chapter proposes a new way to model the personal income process with stochastic monthly transitions between occupations and labor force statuses. Log monthly income while employment is decomposed into two components, the first one is determined by personal characteristics and evolves deterministically, and the second components is determined by the occupation which change over time stochastically. The heterogenous transition probabilities between labor force statuses and occupations can generate heterogenous life-cycle income profiles. Transition probabilities are decomposed into: a) categorical probabilities which govern the career development and moving in and out of labor force, and b) conditional probabilities which specifies the new occupation upon promotion, demotion or re-employment. Two types of probabilities are estimated separated and combined to construct the transition probabilities. Using the estimated transition probabilities, I can construct the distribution of income at any time for any initial occupation and personal characteristics. The results highlight that heterogenous people with the same initial income can have very different income growth rate due to different starting occupation and personal characteristics. Lastly, by decomposing the variance of income growth rate into expected individual uncertainty and variance of heterogeneous income profile the model predicts that 55-57% of the income growth variance is due to heterogeneous income profile before age 55.
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You, Hye Young. "Three Essays on Lobbying." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11455.
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My dissertation consists of three essays on lobbying activities by special interest groups. The first paper, "Ex Post Lobbying," systematically documents ex post lobbying, the process by which firms allocate resources during the implementation stage after congressional authorization. Previous theories assume all lobbying is done ex ante, where lobbying activities occur before Congress votes. However, my analysis of over 633,731 lobbying reports demonstrates that almost half of lobbying activity from 1998 to 2012, that targeted specific bills, occurred ex post. I argue that the goal of ex post lobbying is to allow firms to bargain over private benefits that will arise from legislation by targeting regulatory rule-making processes that clarify non-specific parts of bills. Ex post lobbying provides a chance for non-participants in the ex ante lobbying stage to claim their share from government policy.
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Fraiberger, Samuel Paul. "Three essays in economics." Thesis, New York University, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3716522.
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<p> In chapter 1, I show that since the Fall of 2008, out-of-the money puts on high interest rate currencies have become significantly more expensive than out-of-the-money calls, suggesting a large crash risk of those currencies. To evaluate crash risk precisely, I propose a parsimonious structural model that includes both Gaussian and disaster risks. I find that global disaster risk accounts for more than a third of the carry trade risk premium in advanced countries over the 1996 to 2014 sample period. I show that global disaster risk is an important factor in the cross-sectional and time-series variation of exchange rates, interest rates, and equity tail risk. </p><p> In chapter 2, I present a new macroeconomic forecasting methodology which uses sentiment extracted from news articles. I construct a sentiment index by measuring the net amount of positive expressions in a exhaustive panel of Reuters news articles for 16 countries over the period 1988 to 2013. Sharp drops in the index correspond to major economic crisis both at the country level (the 2001 Argentinian debt crisis) and at the regional and global level (the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2008 great recession). Preliminary results show that the index improves GDP and unemployment forecasts compared to standard forecasting methods, consensus forecasts and the WEO forecast. </p><p> In chapter 3, I develop a new dynamic model of peer-to-peer Internet-enabled rental markets for durable goods in which consumers may also trade their durable assets in (traditional) secondary markets, transaction costs and depreciation rates may vary with usage intensity, and consumers are heterogeneous in their price sensitivity and asset utilization rates. I characterize the stationary equilibrium of the model. I analyze the welfare and distributional effects of introducing these rental markets by calibrating our model with US automobile industry data and 2 years of transaction-level data I have obtained from Getaround, a large peer-to-peer car rental marketplace. Our counterfactual analyses vary marketplace access levels and matching frictions, showing that peer-to-peer rental markets change the allocation of goods significantly, substituting rental for ownership and lowering used-good prices while increasing consumer surplus. Consumption shifts are significantly more pronounced for below-median income users, who also provide a majority of rental supply. Our results also suggest that these below-median income consumers will enjoy a disproportionate fraction of eventual welfare gains from this kind of 'sharing economy' through broader inclusion, higher quality rental-based consumption, and new ownership facilitated by rental supply revenues.</p>
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Markey, Amanda Rose. "Three Essays on Boredom." Research Showcase @ CMU, 2014. http://repository.cmu.edu/dissertations/424.
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Boredom has consistently been recognized as a powerful emotion that pervades modern society. Yet despite academic, literary, and media commentaries on boredom’s importance, it has historically received sporadic and sparse attention from scientific researchers. This trend of neglect has begun to change course, and researchers have recently made progress in measuring boredom in a given situation, generating a theory of boredom to account for its various causes, and documenting the correlates of boredom proneness. Nevertheless, some significant gaps remain. This dissertation contributes to the rising tide of boredom research by addressing three gaps in the literature. First, the majority of past researchers have confined their examination of boredom to one-shot surveys and laboratory studies, which has narrowed the shape of research questions and can limit the external validity of findings. The first empirical paper (Chapter 2) leverages a rich experience sampling dataset to document boredom’s prevalence, examine its situational and demographic correlates, and explore whether situational differences can account for group differences (e.g., whether men are more bored than women because of differences in how they spend their time). In addition to the gap in empirical work outside the laboratory, the work on boredom inside the laboratory is characterized by a significant methodological limitation, the lack of a validated boredom elicitation task. The second empirical paper (Chapter 3) addresses this methodological gap by testing and comparing the effectiveness of boredom inductions. This necessary methodological development contributes to the internal validity of laboratory experiments, which are indispensable in addressing boredom’s causal factors. Recently, a comprehensive theory outlining boredom’s function and causal determinants was proposed (Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, & Myers, 2013). However, this theory has not been empirically tested, the main goal of the third essay (Chapter 4). These three essays contribute to empirical knowledge about the experience of boredom in everyday life, provide a validated methodological tool necessary to manipulate boredom in controlled laboratory settings, and advance the development of a comprehensive theory of state boredom that can be used to predict boredom’s occurrence and inform interventions. Taken together, these essays characterize the nature of boredom in society and help explain when, and why, this interesting emotion occurs.
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Lee, Joo-Heon. "Three essays in entrepreneurship." Full text, Acrobat Reader required, 2001. http://viva.lib.virginia.edu/etd/diss/Darden/Management/2002/lee/Thesis.pdf.
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Park, Hee-Seok. "Three essays in macroeconomics /." Search for this dissertation online, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ksu/main.
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Pruitt, Seth James. "Three essays on macroeconomics." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2008. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3307035.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008.<br>Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 1, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Fu, Qiang. "Three essays on contests." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3167272.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Economics, 2005.<br>Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 3, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 1111. Chair: Michael R. Baye.
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Wang, Jiahui. "Three essays on econometrics /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/7477.
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Shaleva, Anna Evgenieva. "Three essays on trust." Doctoral thesis, Universidad de Alicante, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10045/35660.
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Rostom, M. "Three essays on debt." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2018. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10049936/.
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The overall theme of this thesis pertains to agents' response, as a result of having debt, in the wake of the Great Recession. Two chapters focus on households-this has been my primary focus throughout my studies. The first paper examines the relationship between mortgage leverage and consumption around the 2008 financial crisis. Using survey data, we show that highly leveraged households made larger cuts to consumption following the financial crisis and that this was largely driven by younger households. Using a life-cycle framework, we investigate the channels by which highly leveraged households may have reduced consumption by more than others. The second paper examines the link between mortgage product availability and final consumer choice. We find that the average person shopping for a mortgage has over 90 mortgages to choose from (although most have similar total costs). Most make reasonable choices, however we find that about 7.5\% of households choose very expensive mortgages (relative to their income). The larger the pool of mortgages to choose from, the more likely that a household makes a very expensive choice. The final paper examines the impact of changes in the supply of credit from banks on firm productivity. We use firm level data around the global financial crisis and information on pre-existing lending relationships to isolate exogenous credit supply shocks. We find some evidence that contractions in bank's supply of credit are associated with reductions in labour productivity and wages.
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Naghi, Andrea. "Three essays in econometrics." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/93377/.
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Chapter One, A Forecast Rationality Test that Allows for Loss Function Asymmetries, proposes a new forecast rationality test that allows for asymmetric preferences without assuming any particular functional form for the forecaster's loss function. The construction of the test is based on the simple idea that under rationality, asymmetric preferences imply that the conditional bias of the forecast error is zero. The null hypothesis of forecast rationality under asymmetric loss (i.e. no conditional bias) is tested by constructing a Bierens [1982, 1990] conditional moment type test. Chapter Two, Global Identification Failure in DSGE Models and its Impact on Forecasting, considers the identification problem in DSGE models and its transfer to other objects of interest such as point forecasts. The results document that when observationally equivalent parameter points belong to the same model structure, the implied point forecasts are the same under both correct specification and misspecification. However, when analyzing the identification problem permitting models with different structures (e.g. different policy rules that produce sets of data dynamics that are quantitatively similar), the paper shows that indistinguishable parameter estimates can lead to distinct predictions. Chapter Three, Identification Robust Predictive Ability Testing, considers the predictive accuracy evaluation of models that are strongly identified in some part of the parameter space but non-identified or weakly identified in another part of the parameter space. The paper shows that when comparing the predictive ability of models that might be affected by identification deficiencies, the null distribution of out-of-sample predictive ability tests is not well approximated by the standard normal distribution. As a result, employing a standard (strong) identification critical value might lead to misleading inference. We propose methods to make the out-of-sample predictive ability tests robust to identification loss.
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Auer, Raphael Anton Maximilian Peter Gabriel. "Three essays in macroeconomics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37416.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2006.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>This thesis is a collection of three essays on international trade and economic growth. Chapter 1 analyzes the dynamic gains from trade in a Hecksher-Ohlin economy with endogenous factor accumulation. In a framework where heterogeneous workers make educational decisions in the presence of complete markets, I first show how convergence of factor rewards induces divergence of factor abundance and levels of income. When heterogeneous workers invest in schooling, higher type agents earn a surplus from their investment. By affecting educational decisions, trade influences the international distribution of this surplus. The latter effect tends to benefit richer countries disproportionately, leading to divergence of welfare when markets are opened to trade. The shift of investments to initially rich countries also leads to a global increase of the average skill premium despite a decrease of the price of skill intensive goods. I next examine whether the factor content of trade indeed does affect domestic education decisions. To establish a causal relation, I instrument for the factors embodied in actual imports by the geographic component of trade. The constructed measures of geographical proximity to skilled and unskilled labor have significant effects on domestic educational decisions.<br>(cont.) Countries that tend to be close to international supply of skilled labor have lower levels of advanced education, while the reverse is true for countries that are close to labor abundant nations. A one standard deviation difference in geographic proximity to skilled labor is associated with a difference' of about 2/3 of a year of average higher education. Chapter 2 examines why movements of relative costs brought about by exchange rate fluctuations are passed on to customers only slowly, and never to a full extent. We first develop a perfectly competitive economy featuring heterogeneity of both good qualities and of consumer valuations. In equilibrium, high valuation consumers and high quality firms are matched. The relative scarcity of different qualities leads to pricing-to-market and markups that are determined by the local toughness of competition. Our production setup features trade in intermediate goods, local assembly that is subject to decreasing returns and fixed costs of market entry. In every export market, firm entry and size decisions are determined by how local prices compare to the cost of production at home. We next analyze how changes in the real exchange rate are transmitted internationally.<br>(cont.) In the short run, the set of firms active in the export sector is fixed, but each firm accommodates changes in the exchange rate by adjusting the quantity of its exports. Due to this response of export volume to the relative cost of production, market toughness counteracts exchange rate movements, leading to partial pass-through in the short run. Due to the presence of fixed costs of market access, in the long run also the set of firms that are actively exporting reacts to movements of the real exchange rate, with two associated consequences. Firstly, pass-through is larger than in the short run because long run export volume responds to relative costs due to changes in both the average firm size and in the number of firms. Secondly, the response of the market entry decision to changes in the relative cost of production affects only low quality firms, which fetch a relatively low price for their output. Exchange rate movements thus change the composition of actively exporting firms, with the consequence that aggregate price indexes overstate the actual extent of pass-through in the long run. Chapter 3 further examines the seminal work of Acemoglu et al. (2001) on the effects of settler mortality on colonization policies during early imperialism.<br>(cont.) The authors build a strong case for the importance of institutions as the primary force of economic development. However, because their empirical analysis is limited to former colonies, they cannot directly distinguish their theory from the rivaling view that a country's disease environment has direct effects on economic prosperity and institutions. In this paper, using either additional historical sources or a model of the geographic determinants of disease, I first construct two measures of mortality rates including up to 36 countries that have not been colonized. I then show that mortality did affect institutional development in former colonies but not in the rest of the sample. This can only be rationalized in the context of the colonial origins theory of Acemoglu et al. Turning to disentanlge the relation between institutions and income, I sometimes find that disease environment influences income also directly and correspondingly, that institutions are somewhat less important for prosperity in my specifications than when working with a sample composed of only former colonies. Incorporating these findings, I estimate that institutions are the major determinant of long run prosperity and can explain about 50% of the observed variation of current income levels, while the direct effects of disease environment can account for about 15%.<br>by Raphael Anton Maximilian Peter Gabriel Auer.<br>Ph.D.
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Shin, Jiwoong 1971. "Three essays in marketing." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28831.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, February 2005.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>(cont.) that threaten to disappear cause decision makers to invest more effort and money in order to keep these options open, even when the options themselves seem to be of little interest. The last experiment provides initial evidence that the mechanism underlying the tendency to keep doors open is a type of loss aversion rather than a desire for flexibility.<br>The first essay studies the credibility of non-commitment advertising. To attract potential customers, retailers often advertise low prices with appeals such as Prices start at $49 or One week in the Caribbean from $449. We offer here an explanation of how such advertisements can construct a credible price image in the absence of any commitment based on the role of selling costs. When retailers must incur costs in the process of selling a product, advertising low prices to lure potential consumers can backfire. This is so because attracting too many consumers who are less likely to purchase the retailer's higher priced products imposes unwanted selling costs, but yields little extra revenue. We show analytically that such advertising can be credible only when there is a substantial difference in retailers' cost types or the selling cost is high. The second essay analyzes the free-riding problem under the situation where the selling costs are high. Intuitively, we can expect that free-riding will hurt the retailer who provides service. Nonetheless, we analytically show that free-riding actually benefits not only the free-riding retailer, but also the retailer who provides service. The intuition behind this result is that by allowing free-riding, the service provider can induce a softer re-action from its competitor who now enjoy free-riding. Therefore, allowing free-riding can be regarded as a strategic investment which prevents an aggressive response from the other retailer. The third essay adopts an experimental approach to the study of incentives. The question asked in this work is whether a threat of disappearance changes the way such options are valued. In four experiments using door games, we demonstrate that options<br>by Jiwoong Shin.<br>Ph.D.
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Willmore, Henry. "Three essays on economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/12254.
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He, Li 1977. "Three essays in finance." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37111.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2006.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>This thesis consists of three essays on asset pricing. Chapter 1 presents an equilibrium model to study the convergence trading of large hedge funds in segmented markets. The model provides an alternative explanation for the anomaly of a price gap between two fundamentally identical securities. Strategic arbitrageurs, taking into account their price impact, do not close the price gap. This gap makes investors who trade with the strategic arbitrageur less willing to invest in risky assets ex ante. Thus, the gap brings an additional source of risk, anticipation risk. The model predicts that the future price gap is wide when the current trading volume is high. Daily data for Royal Dutch and Shell provides evidence in support of the model. Chapter 2 (coauthored with Joon Chae and Andrew W. Lo) is about stock price behavior. We perform various statistical analyses on stock market returns as Fama (1965) did, using CRSP index returns from 1926-2005. We investigate stock return distributions and report return characteristics. First, stock returns do not follow a normal distribution, though many studies assume this.<br>(cont.) Second, autocorrelations of stock returns are not zero (as verified by many predictability studies). In addition, the level of autocorrelations varies widely across time. Third, there is little evidence for long term memory and cyclic behavior. Finally, several stock market anomalies, including January effect, weekday effect, turn-of-the-month effect and turn-of-the-quarter effect, are still significant after many years of their discoveries. Chapter 3 studies the statistics of Sharpe ratio differences. We derive the statistical distributions of the Sharpe ratio differences using standard asymptotic theory under three sets of assumptions for the return-generating process - independently and identically distributed returns, stationary returns, and with time aggregation. We compare the hedge fund Sharpe ratios and find that the Sharpe ratio differences are not statistically different from zero.<br>by Li He.<br>Ph.D.
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Farhi, Emmanuel. "Three essays in macroeconomics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37412.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2006.<br>Page 157 blank.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>Chapter 1 analyzes the theoretical and quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model with incomplete markets. I first consider the problem of a government facing expenditure shocks in an economy where the only asset is a real risk-free bond. The model features a representative-agent economy with proportional taxes on labor and capital. Taxes on capital must be set one period in advance, reflecting inertia in tax codes. This rules out replication of the complete markets allocation. In the model, capital taxation and capital ownership provide a state contingent source of revenues - creating a new potential role for capital taxation and ownership as risk sharing instruments between the government and private agents. For a baseline case, I show that the optimal policy features a zero tax on capital. Numerical simulations show that the baseline case provides an excellent benchmark: the average tax on capital, while not theoretically zero, turns out to be small. The volatility of capital taxes decreases sharply as the period length is increased. I then allow the government to hold a non trivial position in capital. Capital ownership allows the government to realize about 90% of the welfare gains from moving to complete markets.<br>(cont.) Large positions are typically required for optimality. But smaller positions achieve substantial benefits. In a business-cycle simulation, I show that a 15% short equity position achieves over 40% of the welfare gains from completing markets. Chapter 2 is the product of joint work with Ivan Werning and analyzes how estate taxes should optimally be set.For an economy with altruistic parents facing productivity shocks, the optimal estate taxation is progressive: fortunate parents should face lower net returns on their inheritances. This progressivity reflects optimal mean reversion in consumption, which ensures that a long-run steady state exists with bounded inequality-avoiding immiseration. Chapter 3 is the product of joint work with Stavros Panageas. We study optimal consumption and portfolio choice in a framework where investors save for early retirement and assume that agents can adjust their labor supply only through an irreversible choice of their retirement time. We obtain closed form solutions and analyze the joint behavior of retirement time, portfolio choice, and consumption. Investing for early retirement tends to increase savings and stock market exposure, and reduce the marginal propensity to consume out of accumulated personal wealth.<br>(cont.) Contrary to common intuition, prior to retirement an investor might find it optimal to increase the proportion of financial wealth held in stocks as she ages, even when she receives a constant income stream and the investment opportunity set is also constant. This is particularly true when the wealth of the investor increases rapidly due to strong stock market performance, as was the case in the late 1990's. We also show that the model can potentially provide a rational explanation for the paradoxical fact that some investors saving for retirement chose to increase their allocation to stocks as the market was booming and reduce it thereafter.<br>by Emmanuel Farhi.<br>Ph.D.
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Philippon, Thomas. "Three essays in macroeconomics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17573.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2003.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>Chapter 1 focuses on corporate governance and business cycles. The delegation of control to insiders fosters initiative but it also gives them the opportunity to expand their firm beyond the profit-maximizing size. When goods markets are imperfectly competitive, firms are too small relative to the social optimum. In such circumstances, insiders' tendency to increase investment, employment and output are at once costly for shareholders and beneficial for the economy. Under plausible assumptions, I show that firms find it optimal to delegate control when demand is high, and that delegation choices provide a powerful amplification mechanism. Finally, the model predicts that an increase in firm volatility can decrease aggregate volatility and I present evidence consistent with this prediction. Chapter 2 studies the implications of higher product market competition and capital market integration for unemployment in Europe. These changes are likely to increase efficiency and output in the long run, but it may take time for economic actors to fully understand them and adapt. In the presence of collective bargaining and slow learning by unions, these changes can generate first a rise, then a decline in unemployment. This fits the general evolution of unemployment in Europe since the 1970s. The speed of learning by unions is likely to depend on the degree of trust between labor and capital. The empirical evidence suggests that countries where trust was lower have had more of an increase, and a later turnaround, in unemployment. Chapter 3 compares the impact of shocks to U.S. interest rates and emerging market bond spreads on domestic interest rates and exchange rates across several emerging market economies with different exchange rate regimes.<br>(cont.) Consistent with conventional priors, the results indicate that interest rates in Hong Kong react much more to U.S. interest rate shocks and shocks to international risk premia than interest rates in Singapore. The results are less clear-cut in the comparison of Argentina and Mexico: while interest rates in Mexico seem to react less to U.S. interest rate shocks, they react about the same to bond spread shocks, in addition to a significant impact on the exchange rate.<br>by Thomas Philippon.<br>Ph.D.
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Lee, Joonhwan. "Three essays on econometrics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/93809.
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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2014.<br>Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>This thesis consists of three chapters that cover separate topics in econometrics. The first chapter demonstrate a negative result on the asymptotic sizes of subset Anderson- Rubin tests with weakly identified nuisance parameters and general covariance structure. The result of Guggenberger et al (2012) in case of homoskedasticity is shown to break down when general covariance structure is allowed. I provide a thorough simulation results to show that the break-down of the result can be observed in wide range of parameters that is plausible in empirical applications. The second chapter propose an inference procedure on Quasi-Bayesian estimators accounting for Monte-Carlo numerical errors. Quasi-Bayesian method have been applied to numerous applications to tackle the non-convex shape arises in certain extremum estimations. The method involves drawing finite number of Monte Carlo Markov chains to make inference and thus some degree of numerical error is inevitable. This chapter quantifies the degree of numerical error arising from the finite draws and provides a method to incorporate such errors into the final inference. I show that a sufficient condition for establishing correct numerical standard errors is geometric ergodicity of the MCMC chain. It is also shown that geometric ergodicity is satisfied under Metropolis Hastings chains with quasi-posterior for the whole class of extremum estimators. The third chapter considers fixed effects estimation and inference in nonlinear panel data models with random coefficients and endogenous regressors. The quantities of interest are estimated by cross sectional sample moments of generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators applied separately to the time series of each individual. To deal with the incidental parameter problem introduced by the noise of the within-individual estimators in short panels, we develop bias corrections. These corrections are based on higher-order asymptotic expansions of the GMM estimators and produce improved point and interval estimates in moderately long panels. Under asymptotic sequences where the cross sectional and time series dimensions of the panel pass to infinity at the same rate, the uncorrected estimators have asymptotic biases of the same order as their asymptotic standard deviations. The bias corrections remove the bias without increasing variance.<br>by Joonhwan Lee.<br>Ph. D.
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Arsenis, Panagiotis. "Three essays on corruption." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/28595.
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This thesis is a study on corruption from an economics perspective. Corruption is defined as the misuse of power in public office for private gain. Unfortunately, its obscure nature makes it difficult to identify and fight it. The thesis’ aim is to increase our understanding of its mechanics and help toward this direction. In particular, it consists of three different studies, which focus on the causes of corruption, its consequences and measurement. The first section investigates whether political leaders are empirically associated with governance, one of its constituent elements being corruption. The results show that leaders do matter for bureaucratic quality and the rule of law, especially in autocratic regimes. Corruption does not seem to be affected by leaders though, which is an outcome probably driven by the data inadequacies and the inherent features of malfeasance. The second part elaborates on corruption as a driving force behind a salient feature of demographic transition. This is the dilemma that parents face whether to improve their children’s education or increase the size of their families. Corruption can affect their decision since it impedes the provision of public services important for the development of human capital. The model shows that higher levels of corruption increase fertility, diminish human capital and lower growth. Additionally, the model offers an explanation for the empirical observation of volatile fertility rates. Finally, the last study explores the measurement of malfeasance. Initially, a new dataset is built including measures of perceived corruption along with survey questions. A sample of 10 measures is chosen taking into consideration their nature and reliability. An advanced statistical model is applied to this sample in order to construct a new index of corruption, whose scores are accompanied by their measurement errors as well. The strength of the new index is its ability to combine the knowledge of numerous scholars and analysts who examine corruption. In addition, the model is equipped with tools that make feasible the comparison of the constituent measures’ different levels and reliability on the same underlying scale.
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Cook, Kirsten Abram. "Three essays on taxation." Thesis, [College Station, Tex. : Texas A&M University, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1396.
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Sahin, Ali. "Three essays in accounting." Thesis, City, University of London, 2016. http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/17043/.
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This thesis consists of three essays focusing on three different issues. The first revisits the question whether analysts anticipate the persistence of accruals in future earnings. We find that if total accruals are used (covering also non-current operating and financing accruals, unlike previous research that uses mainly working capital accruals), analysts’ forecast errors are uncorrelated with accruals. Our findings overall do not warrant the lack of sophistication argument. The second chapter examines whether multi segmentation affects the probability of meeting analysts’ forecasts, and whether the ‘diversification’ discount that multi segment firms seem to suffer from is alleviated/exacerbated when multi segment firms meet/miss analysts’ forecasts. We find for multi segment firms, no (less) earnings/forecast management to meet forecasts, more complex information environment, lower probability of meeting analysts’ forecasts, and weaker investor reaction to meeting/missing forecasts, while significant discount if they meet forecasts by engaging in earnings/forecast management. The third chapter examines whether unconditional accounting conservatism provides a rational explanation to book to price (B/P) effect in stock returns (higher B/P yielding higher returns) coined as anomaly. We test an argument following Penman and Reggiani (2013) linking conservative accounting to future returns and subsequent earnings growth, and we find strong support to the conservative accounting explanation to B/P effect.
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Santos, Fernando Siqueira dos. "Three essays on macroeconomics." reponame:Repositório Institucional do FGV, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10438/10725.
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Previous issue date: 2013-03-04<br>This thesis is composed of 3 empirical studies on macroeconomics. The first essay studies the persistence of inflation in Brazil. The second essay studies the concepts and measures of potential output and neutral interest rate, two fundamental pillars in the conduct of monetary policy. The third essay studies the parity of local and foreign interest rates. The first essay measures the neutral real interest rate for Brazil during 1997-2012 using different methodologies. The results show some difference in the estimates of the natural interest rate in Brazil depending on the specification of the IS curve and its explanatory variables. Measurement of the output gap is not a source of divergence among our estimation of natural rate as different methodologies yields similar values for the output gap. Joint estimation of the inflation and output cycles leads only to small difference in the output gap estimates and hence on natural interest rate. Finally, our results indicate that the impact of monetary policy on output gap increased during the last years. The second essay analyzes inflation persistence in Brazil. Both aggregate and disaggregated inflation persistence are computed. We also compare inflation persistence in Brazil with estimates for other emerging countries with a long history of high inflation. The results indicate that inflation persistence in Brazil is higher than in other emerging markets. Core inflation presents more inflation persistence than headline inflation, particularly due to the exclusion of the low persistence food items. Despite the large persistence in Brazilian inflation, disaggregated data are more sensible to expected inflation than lagged inflation and thus indicates a major role for forward looking behavior. The third essay studies the difference between interest rates in Brazil and other countries, particularly US, and evidence of arbitrage investments aiming at exploring this difference. Our results indicate that there is important evidence of foreign investment inflows to Brazil but the impact of these flows are not sufficient to reduce local interest rates substantially. Both country and currency risk are important determinants of the interest rate difference between Brazil and other countries but exchange rate risk, particularly exchange rate volatility, plays a major role in avoiding full interest rate convergence. Despite the large BRL volatility, a simple strategy of going long BRL + local rate (similar to buy BRL forward contracts) would have generated large Sharpe ratios, closer or higher than Sharpe ratios generated from more complex strategies involving long position on high yield currencies and short position on low yield currencies.<br>Esta tese é composta por 3 estudos empíricos sobre macroeconomia. O primeiro ensaio discute a persistência da inflação no Brasil. O segundo estudo analisa o produto potencial e, principalmente, a questão taxa neutra de juros no Brasil, tema fundamental para a condução da política monetária. O último trabalho discute a questão da paridade entre os juros no Brasil e no exterior. O primeiro ensaio desta tese estima a taxa real de juros de equilíbrio no Brasil durante o período 1997-2012 usando diversas metodologias. Os resultados mostram alguma diferença nas estimativas da taxa de juros de equilíbrio dependendo da especificação utilizada, principalmente na modelagem da Curva IS. A mensuração do hiato do produto não é o principal responsável pelos resultados encontrados para a taxa de juros de equilíbrio. A estimação conjunta do PIB potencial e taxa neutra de juros não leva a resultados muito diferentes dos obtidos estimando a taxa neutra isoladamente. Independente do modelo utilizado, os resultados indicam redução na taxa de equilíbrio no Brasil nos últimos anos. O segundo ensaio estima a persistência da inflação no Brasil tanto em termos agregados quanto desagregados. O trabalho ainda compara a persistência da inflação no Brasil com a persistência em outros países emergentes. Os resultados indicam que a persistência da inflação no Brasil é maior do que em outros países, mas este resultado não é obtido para todos os métodos de estimação utilizados. A persistência no núcleo da inflação é maior do que na 'inflação cheia'. Apesar da persistência elevada, nossos resultados indicam que a expectativa de inflação é uma variável mais importante na determinação da inflação corrente do que a inflação passada. O terceiro ensaio analisa a diferença entre as taxas de juros no Brasil e no exterior, particularmente nos EUA, e evidências de fluxos de investimentos locais ou estrangeiros para explorar o diferencial de juros. Os resultados indicam que os fluxos de investimento estrangeiro tiveram pouco impacto nas taxas de juros no Brasil. Medidas de risco-país e risco cambial são importantes para explicar o diferencial de juros sendo que as medidas de risco-país parecem ter sido mais importante no início de nossa amostra enquanto as medidas de risco cambial foram mais importantes nos últimos anos. Medidas de risco cambial, particularmente a volatilidade do câmbio ajudam a explicar a falta de convergência dos juros no Brasil com os juros praticados no exterior. Apesar da elevada volatilidade da taxa de cambio, uma simples estratégia de comprar Real (BRL) e investidor no mercado local de juros (estratégia similar a aplicar no contrato futuro de Real) teria gerado um índice de Sharpe tão elevado ou maior do que o observado em estratégias mais sofisticadas envolvendo diversas moedas.
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Hildebrand, Nikolaus(Nikolaus Valentin). "Three essays in economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122104.
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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019<br>Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>This thesis consists of three chapters. I, first, study the long-run growth of finance. I construct comprehensive national financial balance sheets, financial accounts and production accounts for twelve advanced economies over the past two centuries using hundreds of historical sources. Financial asset-to-output ratios more than quintuple while the output share of finance industry more than quadruples. Despite this dramatic growth in the volume of finance, financial deepening is slow and the structure of finance is stable. Financial growth over the past two centuries is primarily driven by capital formation. These results shed new light on the recent dramatic expansion of financial assets, services, and debt, and directly link these secular trends to an ongoing debate on rising wealth-income ratios and inequality. The second chapter, joint with Johannes Hermle, studies the impact of a male breadwinner norm on gender inequality.<br>We develop a marriage market matching model featuring a male breadwinner norm - a discontinuity in husbands' marginal utility from spousal income. We predict that a norm should cause a concave kink in households' relative income distribution, a kinked increase in the divorce probability and a kinked increase in household good provision by females at the point where both spouses earn the same. We test these predictions using large administrative tax data from Germany. Consistent with the presence of a male breadwinner norm, we find a sharp kink in the relative income distribution at the 50% threshold as well as a crowd-out of couples with a female primary earner relative to random matching. The third chapter studies the evolution of financial systems in common and civil law countries since 1870.<br>I show that, In line with legal origins theory, civil law countries have always had significantly smaller capital markets, smaller financial sectors and more bank-reliant financial systems than common law countries. Convergence immediately prior to World War I can be explained by increased financial integration and free capital movement, while financial fragmentation and shocks to the capital stock during and after the war help explain the strong divergence afterwards.<br>by Nikolaus Hildebrand.<br>Ph. D.<br>Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics
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Taptue, André-Marie. "Three Essays on Polarization." Doctoral thesis, Université Laval, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11794/26111.
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Cette thèse porte sur la comparaison de la polarisation dans les distributions de revenu et est organisée en quatre chapitres. L’importance d’étudier la polarisation provient des risques de tensions sociales qui peuvent survenir dans une économie polarisée en plus de l’effritement de sa classe moyenne et les conséquences néfastes sur le développement économique. Le premier chapitre procède à une revue des différents travaux qui traitent de la polarisation. Certains de ces travaux établissent les fondements pour la mesure de la polarisation et la distinction avec la mesure des inégalités tandis que d’autres analysent les différentes manières de considérer les distances et les disparités entre individus et la façon dont la polarisation peut être mesurée dans une perspective économique, sociale et socio-économique. Ce premier chapitre distingue cinq types de polarisation : la polarisation du revenu, la bi-polarisation, la polarisation sociale, la polarisation socio-économique et la polarisation multidimensionnelle. Le deuxième chapitre prend en compte les deux composantes de la polarisation que sont l’aliénation et l’identification pour développer une méthode de dominance stochastique en polarisation. Cette méthode est appliquée pour comparer la polarisation entre 16 pays et les USA pris comme pays de référence, en utilisant les données du Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). Certains pays comme le Danemark, la Norvège ou la Suisse affichent moins de polarisation que les USA tandis que les USA affichent moins de polarisation que l’Espagne, l’Italie et la Grèce. Le troisième chapitre considère uniquement la composante aliénation dans les indices de polarisation et développe une approche pour comparer la taille de la classe moyenne dans deux distributions de revenu. La comparaison des distributions de revenu est établie pour une classe d’indices de polarisation indépendants de la composante identification et dont le développement conduit à l’introduction de surfaces de dominance en aliénation. Une distribution possédant une grande surface de dominance en aliénation est plus concentrée dans les extrêmes et possède une classe moyenne de petite importance. Une application numérique permet de comparer l’effritement de la classe moyenne des distributions de revenus de 22 pays à l’aide des données du LIS. Il en ressort que les USA ont une classe moyenne plus importante que le Mexique et le Pérou mais moins importante que le reste des pays. Le quatrième et dernier chapitre s’intéresse à la dimension identification dans les indices de polarisation et dérive une classe d’indices pouvant être utilisés pour mesurer le degré d’homogénéité dans une distribution de revenu. Le développement aboutit à des courbes de dominance qui peuvent être utilisées pour déterminer si l’homogénéité ou le degré de similarité est plus élevé dans une distribution que dans une autre. Cette méthodologie est utilisée pour comparer l’homogénéité des distributions de revenus de 11 pays en utilisant les données du LIS. Cette application montre que les USA sont plus homogènes que le Mexique et le Pérou mais moins homogènes que tous les autres pays.<br>This thesis addresses the problem of polarization comparison and is organized in four chapters. A motivation to study polarization stems from the risk of social unrest that may arise in a polarized society along with the disappearance of its middle class and the negative consequences on the economic development. The first chapter reviews the basic conceptual foundations for the measurement of polarization, the origins of those foundations, how polarization is distinct from inequality and other ways of considering distances and differences across individuals, and how polarization can be measured in an economic, a social, and a hybrid socioeconomic perspective. It distinguishes five different types of polarization: income polarization, bi-polarization, social polarization, socio-economic polarization and multidimensional polarization. The second chapter develops a method of stochastic dominance in polarization accounting separately for the two basic components of polarization, namely alienation and identification. The methodology establishes a robust comparison of polarization based on the variations of alienation and identification thresholds and is applied to data from seventeen countries taking the USA as a benchmark to which are compared the other 16 countries. Data are drawn from the Luxembourg Income Study database. As a result, stochastic dominance can hold in either direction since some countries like Denmark, Norway or Switzerland stochastically dominate the USA and the USA stochastically dominates other countries like Spain, Italy or Greece. The third chapter shows how to compare the size of the middle class in income distributions using only the alienation component of polarization. We derive a class of polarization indices where the antagonism function is constant in identification. The comparison of distributions using an index from this class motivates the introduction of an alienation dominance surface, which is a function of an alienation threshold. We first prove that a distribution has a large alienation component in polarization compared to another if it always has a larger dominance surface regardless of the value of the alienation threshold. Then, we show that the distribution with a large dominance surface is more concentrated in the tails and has a smaller middle class than the other distribution. An empirical illustration with the distributions of twenty-two countries from the Luxembourg Income Study database shows that the USA has a higher middle class than Mexico and Peru and a smaller middle class than the rest of the countries. The fourth and last chapter develops a methodology to compare the degree of homogeneity of two income distributions using only the identification component of polarization. This development leads to identification dominance curves and derives first-order and higher-order stochastic dominance conditions. Dominance curves are used to determine whether identification, homogeneity, or similarity of individuals is greater in one distribution than in another for general classes of polarization indices and ranges of possible identification thresholds. Our methodology is illustrated by comparing pairs of distributions of eleven countries drawn from the Luxembourg Income Study database. This application shows that the USA is more homogeneous than Mexico and Peru and less homogeneous than the other countries.
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Anghel, Anca-Patricia. "Three essays in economics/." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127031.
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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, May, 2020<br>Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>This thesis consists of three chapters. The αrst chapter and second chapter contribute to the literature on consumer search, while the third chapter analyzes the e<br>The optimal consumer behavior for a model with normal priors is characterized and the likelihood function is constructed. The learning model generates predictions that can be used to test whether consumers are learning. These predictions are conαrmed by the data. Using clickstream data on search and purchase behavior of consumers looking to book a hotel on Expedia, the theoretical model is leveraged to estimate consumer preferences, a clicking cost distribution, and prior beliefs parameters. Consumers have overoptimistic prior beliefs about the distribution of the unobservable characteristics compared to the true distribution. Thus, consumers click on more hotels compared to when they know the true distribution. However, the estimated clicking costs are too high for consumers to click enough to αnd the optimal hotels for them. The results suggest that the consumer experience could be improved by personalized recommendations and an improved selection of hotels.<br>distribution in demand models with sequential search. I show that if consumers need to pay a search cost to αgure out some product characteristics, aggregate data is not enough to fully non-parametrically identify the demand and the search cost distribution. I show that the distribution of the search cost can be identiαed in the mixed logit models using only aggregate data. Moreover, if micro data is available, the demand functions and search cost distribution cannot be identiαed fully non parametrically. However, if data on the search behavior of consumers is available (clickstream data), I provide a proof of non-parametric identiαcation of the demand function, distribution of utility, and search cost distribution. In the third chapter, I use data from the CPS March survey from 1990 to 2014 to analyze the e<br>It has been suggested that introducing mandatory paid parental leave will have a negative impact on women's wages since women are more likely to take advantage of this policy and since this will result in increased costs to employers. The data is analyzed using the synthetic control method proposed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003). There are no signiαcant short nor long term effects on women's wages or employment rates following the introduction of this program.<br>by Anca-Patricia Anghel.<br>Ph. D.<br>Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics
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Shi, Bowen. "Three Essays on Networks." Diss., Virginia Tech, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/96195.
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This dissertation consists of three essays studying human behavior and contagion phenomenon in networks. The analysis especially focuses on information sharing, trade relationship and pest spread in networks. The first chapter outlines the dissertation by briefly discussing the motivations, methods, and main findings in each of the following chapters.
Chapter two examines the information sharing in networks. We develop a heterogenous agents model in which connections between players act as a channel to exchange information. We focus on specialized equilibria, which is based on Nash tatonnement. It is shown that players utilize the signals in the linear form and only specialized equilibria can be stable. We also compare the sequential equilibria and stable equilibria, and it is shown that stable equilibria form a proper subset of the sequential ones, which gives a sharper prediction. The stable equilibria demonstrate star-like graphs, which is similar to the phenomenon "the law of the few" in the literature.
Chapter three investigates the trade relationship among players where trade between two players can bring benefits as well as conflict. And if conflict happens, the players coordinate based on received information. We show that the optimal structure of trade networks ranges from complete market to Autarky. Also, we study the optimal timing for trade relationship establishment and the optimal size of organizations when facing scarce members. It is shown that when potential neighbors become more scarce, people care more about the future, or new technology breakthroughs occur more frequently, it is optimal to have more neighbors to back up for the potential technological breakthrough.
The last chapter studies the pest spread in the networks. We use a directional and weighted network to study the spread of Tuta absoluta. A robust network-based approach is proposed to model seasonal flow of agricultural produce and examine its role in pest spread. Furthermore, the long-term establishment potential of the pest and its economic impact on the country are assessed. Preliminary analyses indicate that Tuta absoluta will invade most major tomato production regions within a year of introduction and the economic impact of invasion could range from $17-25 million.<br>Ph. D.
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Kassa, Haimanot. "Three Essays in Finance." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1367937084.
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Feng, Guo. "Three Essays on Misintermediation." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1339777235.
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Kim, Sehoon. "Three Essays in Finance." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1498750199681262.
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Furukawa, Chishio. "Three essays in economics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129013.
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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, September, 2020<br>Cataloged from student-submitted PDF of thesis.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>This thesis consists of three essays on diverse topics but shared emphasis on statistical models with theory and empirics. The first and third essay examines the role of cognitive limitations in understanding biases in communication and learning. The second essay, joint with Masao Fukui, highlights the role of distributional assumptions of infection rates for epidemiological predictions, responding to the recent COVID-19 outbreak. The first chapter considers the effects of aggregation frictions on scientific communication and shows that publication bias emerges even when researchers are unbiased and communicate their findings optimally for readers. Specifically, when readers are cognitively constrained, they may only consider the binary conclusions rather than the estimates of the papers. Under such aggregation frictions of readers, researchers are shown to omit noisy null results and inflate marginal results.<br>This chapter presents evidence consistent with this prediction, and develops a new bias correction method, called stem-based correction method, that is robust under the prediction of this and other models of publication selection processes. The second chapter examines the role of infection rate distributions for aggregate epidemiological dynamics in Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) models. Specifically, we show that superspreading events (SSEs) of recent coronavirus outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, follow a power law distribution with fat tails, or infinite variance. When embedding this distribution to stochastic SIR models, we find that idiosyncratic variations in SSEs generate important uncertainties in aggregate epidemiological dynamics.<br>This result stands in contrast with the existing literature on stochastic SIR models that have assumed thin tailed distributions, and thus concluded that the idiosyncratic uncertainties are unimportant when the population is large. The third chapter considers the impact of imperfect recall on experimentation decisions and resulting inferences. When a Bayesian experimenter has an imperfect recall over past actions and information, her decisions depend not only on a confidence level but also on the expectation the future self will hold for today's action. This expectation arises from the persistent prior belief, and leads to the biases to conform to it. Meditation, to regulate one's attention with focus on the present, is shown to have an ameliorating effect: when the attention is focused, prior belief becomes essentially diffused so that the self-imposed expectation over behaviors becomes agnostic.<br>by Chishio Furukawa.<br>Ph. D.<br>Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics
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Giovanniello, Monica Anna. "Three essays on voting." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/81983/.
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This dissertation consists of three chapters, which aim at exploring respectively: i) how parties’ advertisements and voters’ strategic communication affect the political outcome; ii) whether and under which conditions a “market for votes” is preferable to the “one person, one vote” mechanism; and iii) whether subsidies to private donations may be used as strategical device by policy makers to secure re-election. The first chapter analyses how voters’ interactions affect the parties’ advertisement strategies and shape the political outcome of the election. We develop a two level game that embeds: (i) a model of political competition, where parties compete in campaign advertising, (ii) a model of personal influence, where voters can strategically communicate with each other in order to affect the policy outcome. We show that, first, homophily rises endogenously and individuals value only the information received from like-minded voters, regardless of the distance between the voters’ biases. Second, when the richness of the network or the degree of homophily within the network, or both, are low, then parties are likely to tailor their advertising to voters ideological biased toward their opponent - rather than targeting the closer ideological group of voters. The second chapter of this dissertation is joint work with Herakles Polemarchakis. In this chapter, we construct a simple centralized model of spatial voting where voters can sell/buy political influence by trading their votes for a consumption good. We model the voting game as a representative election game in order to concavify total voters’ payoff. By mimicking a majority rule in the election game we are able to focus on the effect of the distributional and ideological conflicts in the society and how these conflicts affect, in turn, the total welfare under two voting allocation mechanisms: the market and the “one person one vote” principle. We show that a market for votes is desirable with respect the “one-person one vote” principle if the degree of conflict in both income and political preferences is extreme, otherwise the simple “one-person one vote” performs better than the market mechanism, as it maximizes the sum of utilities of voters. The third chapter of the thesis is joint work with Carlo Perroni, Kimberly Scharf and Al Slivinski. In this chapter we study how tax relief on private donations towards the private provision of collective goods can protect minorities from majority-driven outcomes where high taxes are exclusively used to finance publicly provided goods that these minorities do not value. We show that an elected policymaker can use the same instruments as a strategic commitment device aimed at creating and supporting political alliances that would not otherwise be able to coalesce, thus securing majority support for re-election.
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Kumar, Navin. "Three Essays in Microeconomics:." Thesis, Boston College, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:109228.
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Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel<br>In this series of essays, I apply the tools of economics to a variety of real world problems. The first essay looks at the impact of a gun control regulation on mortality and crime. A third of US states have removed all restrictions on carrying concealed handguns. This might decrease crime by invisibly arming law-abiding citizens, or increase it by eliminating penalties for criminals. It could have no effect at all, because handguns are easily hidden, so anyone who wished to carry a gun was already doing so. I compare counties along the borders of states that liberalized concealed carry to contiguous counties in neighboring states that did not, using mortality and crime micro-data. I find that deregulation had no impact on homicide, violent crime, firearm mortality, firearm usage, or firearm ownership. The second essay, co-authored with Sajala Pandey, looks at the impact of an earthquake in Nepal on child development. Biologists have posited that prenatal maternal stress (PNMS) has an adverse impact on child development, possibly via the process of epigenetic imprinting which occurs during the first trimester. Researchers have attempted to study this link by using natural disasters as a source of exogenous variation. A shortcoming of these studies is that natural disasters may also affect prenatal healthcare provision, either by decreasing it’s provision (due to infrastructure being destroyed) or increasing it (thanks to aid flowing into the region.) We look at the impact of 2015 Earthquake in Nepal on children who were (a) in utero at the time of the earthquake and (b) in areas severely affected by it. Consistent with theories from PNMS, we find that the earthquake adversely impacted their height-for-age, and the effects were concentrated on individuals who were in the first trimester of gestation. These negative effects were entirely offset by an increase in the consumption of antenatal healthcare. We find that the earthquake resulted in a improvement in development indicators for those children who were in severely affected areas but not in-utero at the time of the earthquake, highlighting the importance of healthcare provision in early childhood. The third essay, co-authored with Andrew Copland, proposes a solution to the problem of assigning multiple scarce goods to agents in the absence of prices, for example assigning seats in courses to students in a university. Students submit a list of preferences over courses, a lottery for rankings is held, and an algorithm allocates each student their top available course, reversing their ranks at the end of each round. Then, for each student, the algorithm compares their outcomes to the outcomes generated by every alternative ordering they could have set. Whenever such revisions result in more preferred outcomes, their preferences are replaced with the alternative. Our solution is non-dictatorial and Pareto optimal. When it converges without encountering a loop, it is strategy-proof. It retains properties even in small economies. We compare our algorithm to alternatives<br>Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021<br>Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences<br>Discipline: Economics
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Brooke, Geoffrey T. F. "Three essays on economic history." Thesis, University of Auckland, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/19236.
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This thesis is composed of three essays. The first essay is a history of economic thought study of the ways in which empirically oriented economic historians have attempted to explain the causes of modern economic growth. The contributions of theorists, classical and neoclassical, are well known. The contributions of economic historians, with a few exceptions, are much less well known. This omission is unfortunate as economic historians have, in the main, remained closer to the data that they are trying to explain than mainstream theorists. Since the pioneering work of Colin Clark, Simon Kuznets, and Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, empirically and theoretically informed economic historians have attempted to measure, locate, and explain the causes of modern economic growth. This essay exposits and evaluates the arguments and methods used. The results have been mixed. The literature is characterized by the failure of empirical studies grounded in neoclassical price theory to explain the mechanism by which growth occurs. This failure has resulted in a return to searching for the necessary conditions required for growth to occur. The change of focus has been accompanied by a shift to increasingly comparative studies, and to an increasing diversity of methods. The second essay presents a real-wage series for New Zealand for the period from 1840 to 1914. Adding 32 years to the existing series, the new series allows a more complete understanding of the growth of wages within New Zealand and relative to the rest of the world. The key observation on the internal economy is that after growing at more than two per cent per annum up to 1882, the growth rate of real wages slowed to less than two thirds of one per cent from 1883 to 1914. In comparative terms, I trace the wage premium of New Zealand over Britain to the early 1850s. The premium peaks during the early 1880s, at approximately 50%, before declining to approximately 35% post 1910. Wages in New Zealand were approximately 75% of Australian wages in the 1850s, and converged with Australian wages no later than 1900. The third essay investigates the causes of the decision by British migrants to move to New Zealand between 1839, when New Zealand became part of the British Empire, and 1914. Migrants faced alternative destinations, most notably the U.S.A., that could be reached more quickly and at lower cost. Approximately half of the migrants received some combination of discounted passages, loans for their passage, employment guarantees, and land grants. Beginning with the insights of Hatton and Williamson into the general characteristics of the nineteenth century mass migration, this essay considers what place various assistance schemes have in explaining the decision of migrants to choose New Zealand as a destination. The econometric analysis suggests that the migrants to New Zealand were motivated by the same concerns as migrants to other destinations. Relative wages were important, as were labour market conditions. While the model is a good fit for the aggregate flow and the assisted migrants, it is a less good fit for the unassisted migrants. These results point to the possibility of cohort differences between the assisted and unassisted migrants. More generally, the essay highlights the impact of institutional factors on the migration decision. Migration is a path-dependent process; understanding why a migration started provides considerable information about the likely course that it will take.
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Kapfer, Joy. "Three Essays in Empirical Economics." Diss., lmu, 2008. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-80042.
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