Three Essays On Macroeconomic And International Finance Issues

The interaction between future binding bank net worth constraints and dynamic (future) underinvestment could lead to ex-ante overinvestment even in economies with a single monopolistic bank where there are no pecuniary externalities. The last third chapter, which is coauthored with Kenneth Rogoff, evaluates a new class of exchange rate forecasting studies, which claim that structural models are getting closer to being able to forecast exchange rates at short horizons. We argue that misinterpretation of some new out-of-sample tests for nested models, over-reliance on asymptotic test statistics, and failure to sufficiently check robustness to alternative time windows have led many studies to overstate even the relatively thin positive results that have been found.

A new interpretation of the operation and macroeconomic repercussions of the international monetary system during the interwar years.

Each of the three essays composing this dissertation investigates important economic and econometric issues in international finance and macroeconomics. The first essay, “Market Structure and the Persistence of Sectoral Deviations from Purchasing Power Parity,” examines the relationship between market structure and the persistence of the dollar-based sectoral real exchange rates for fourteen OECD countries. The empirical results based on disaggregated data suggest that differences in market structure significantly determine the rates at which deviations from sectoral purchasing power parity decay. Based on the findings, I argue that an imperfectly competitive market structure is an important source of the well-documented persistence in real exchange rates.

This dissertation examines two issues in international economics and macroeconomics. The first is to understand the response of productivity to major real exchange rate appreciations and the second concerns how to compare the fits of different calibrated macroeconomic models. In the first chapter, I construct a model to clarify how the increased competition due to an exchange rate appreciation provides incentive for firms to improve productivity. However, if a firm is in an industry shielded by a high trade cost, then the incentive is weaker. In industries with fewer firms, profits are more responsive to productivity improvements, therefore, firms are more likely to invest more heavily in productivity improvement. Empirical analysis of Canadian manufacturing data from 1997 to 2006 finds evidence consistent with the model predictions. The second chapter presents testing procedures for comparison of misspecified calibrated models. The proposed tests are of the Vuong-type (Vuong, 1989; Rivers and Vuong, 2002). In the framework here, an econometrician selects values for the parameters in order to match some characteristics of the data with those implied by the theoretical model. We assume that all competing models are misspecified, and suggest a test for the null hypothesis that all considered models provide equal fit to the data characteristics, against the alternative that one of the models is a better approximation. The Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) model and the Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) model are two leading models that study financial frictions in macroeconomic models. In particular, these models show that due to financial frictions, net worth plays an important role in obtaining external finance, and that at an aggregate level, net worth can propagate technology shocks and monetary shocks. However, neither paper examines whether the models can reproduce cyclical properties of net worth. The third chapter addresses this issue by applying the comparison.