Three Essays On Fiscal Policy And Macroeconomic Fluctuations

The three essay are concerned with the uncertainty and risks that pervade the economy, influence investors and affect policymakers. The first essay shows that monetary policymakers consider events and contingencies to make decisions, and concludes that short-lived regime switches corrupt the descriptive power of linear Taylor-type rules, although these describe well the contours of the Fed's behaviour. The second essay focuses on the role of global and domestic factors for macroeconomic fluctuations in Brazil. The estimates of a VAR model reveal that global risk aversion is an important determinant of the volatility of Brazilian series and affects the monetary policy transmission channel. The third essay builds on the idea that, contrary to the predictions of IRBC models, the degree of international consumption smoothing is low. After a review of the literature addressing the puzzle, it investigates the relationship between external debt and consumption smoothing in a sample of developing countries.

Chapters one and two of the dissertation investigate the effects of political disagreement on macroeconomic outcomes. I introduce a model of governments with heterogeneous preferences over the composition of consumption between private and public goods alternating in power. Unable to commit to future policies, the party in power has incentive not only to shape consumption according to their preferences but also to manipulate the future state faced by successive governments to influence the decisions of future policy makers. Alternating governments give rise to political business cycles; fluctuations in economy-wide variables due to the political system. Political business cycles help explain the divergence in outcomes of economic variables across countries with different levels of political disagreement and political stability. The first chapter adapts a real business cycle model to include political shocks in addition to the productivity shocks. This is motivated by a key puzzle in the business cycle literature: for emerging economies the volatility of consumption is higher than the volatility of output, a feature of the data that is not explained by standard theory. The goal of this chapter is not only to replicate the data but to understand how consumption responds to political shocks differently than shocks to productivity. This model is also able to recreate endogenously the high level of volatility in government expenditure observed in the data. The model can explain up to 29% of the variation in the relative volatility of consumption across countries. Chapter two focuses on a similar model in the presence of debt instead of capital to develop a positive theory for fiscal policy (debt, expenditure, and deficits) over the business cycle to compare to historical observation. I find that political shocks are important to understand observed U.S. data moments. Chapter three investigates the welfare effects of tax-deferred retirement accounts (similar to Traditional IRAs in the US). I find that such accounts increase aggregate welfare as well as increasing economy-wide inequality. I find from an aggregate welfare perspective the optimal contribution limit for IRAs is to not have a contribution limit.

Following Minsky, an economy can be understood as a set of units linked to each other by flows of money payments and by the commitments to future payments reflected on balance sheets. This dissertation offers three accounts of the historical evolution of the US economy, conceived of a network of balance sheets, over the course of 20th and early 21st century. The first essay looks at changes in the pattern of payment flows between nonfinancial corporations and financial markets associated with the ``shareholder revolution" of the 1980s. It argues that the shift in payouts to shareholders from a quasi-fixed stream of dividends to a claim on every dollar actually or potentially available to the firm, has had important effects on the behavior of aggregate investment; in particular, it has weakened the link between corporate investment, on the one hand, and earnings and credit conditions, on the other. The second essay looks at household debt. It argues that that the evolution of household debt-income ratios must be understood as a monetary phenomenon and not merely the reflection of developments in ``real" expenditure and income. Decomposing the changes in household debt since 1929 using an appropriate accounting framework shows that changes in household behavior account for only a small part of the trajectory of household leverage over the past 80 years. The third essay applies this same broad perspective to the historical evolution of interest rate spreads. It argues that from a Keynesian perspective that regards interest as fundamentally the price of liquidity, there is no conceptual basis for picking out the difference in yield between money and a short-term government bond as``the" interest rate; there are many other pairs of asset yields the difference between which is determined on the same principles, and may have equal macroeconomic significance. This perspective helps make sense of the increasing gap between the policy rate and the interest rates facing most private borrowers.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of monetary and financial economics. Specifically, we use high-frequency financial data to study monetary policies with a focus on the information effect, namely, that some of the interest rate movements around central bank announcements are not policy-driven, but are results of the market becoming aware of the central bank's view about future economic prospects. Understanding the role played by the information effect will help us apprehend monetary policy implications in both normal times and extraordinary situations. Chapter 1 evaluates the impact of unconventional monetary policy in the newly developed instrumental variable structural Vector Autoregression (VAR) framework. In the current low interest rate environment, central banks must resort to using unconventional monetary policies, such as forward guidance and quantitative easing, to flight recessions. To empirically evaluate the effectiveness of these unconventional policies, we need to rely on the clean policy shock. A prominent concern is that the often used high-frequency interest rate surprises not only reflect unexpected policy changes, but also contain the information effect. We contribute to the literature by using a heteroskedasticity identification approach, taking advantage of changes in the relative dominance of economic shocks around different macroeconomic announcements. Analysis based on clean policy shocks suggests that the unconventional policies successfully aided the recovery in the U.S. More importantly, we show that the information effect, while it may introduce bias, is rather modest when it comes to estimating the real impact of unconventional monetary policies. Chapter 2 studies the stock return pattern after the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcement. This research is motivated by recent literature that documents stock returns drifts, both before and after FOMC announcements, according to policy rate surprises. Indeed, research has shown that the information contained in the central bank announcement is multifaceted: its current monetary policy stances (monetary policy news) and news about future economic prospects (non-monetary policy news). Our contribution is to combine these two strands of literature. To the best of our knowledge, no study has looked at stock market reactions to the non-monetary news stemming from policy announcements. We identify both good and bad news events using a combination of sign restriction with high-frequency financial prices. The novel finding is that following bad FOMC announcements, that is the market interpreted the Fed announcements as revealing negative information about the economy, we observe significant positive stock returns in a 20-day period. We call this the ``post-FOMC drift.'' Further analysis suggests that the drift is likely caused by relatively heightened risks associated with bad announcements, although the drift is consistent with market overreactions as well. Moreover, the post FOMC drift is a market-wide phenomenon and can be exploited in an easy-to-implement trading strategy with a historical record of earning 40\% of the annual equity premium. In Chapter 3, we explore the channels through which the FOMC announcements affect the financial market. While much of the existing literature measures the surprise components with only changes in policy rates (surrounding the announcement), we contribute to the existing literature by taking a broader view through examining unexpected changes in longer-term yields, corporate credit spreads, and inflation expectations (a proxy for growth prospects), using high-frequency financial data. Through a regression analysis, our findings show that these additional surprises provide orthogonal information and sharply increase the goodness of fit in explaining stock returns around FOMC announcements, with the inclusion of inflation expectations having the biggest contribution. The important role of inflation expectation suggests that the current literature, which uses stock prices together with nominal rates to disentangle the information contents of central bank announcements, may be too limited in the scope of information it uses.