Essays on the transmission of economic shocks.

Abstract

This thesis explores the transmission of economic shocks. Although the thesis is structured as four stand-alone chapters, the common theme throughout is identifying the impact of economic shocks: either idiosyncratic shocks at the household-level, macroeconomic shocks emanating from foreign countries and transmitted through global markets, or countries’ own macroeconomic policy changes (for example, structural reforms or trade reforms). Each chapter applies a different empirical methodology, including structural estimation, reduced form instrumental variables estimation, and growth accounting. Finally, each chapter utilizes a different dataset and country sample selection. While one chapter uses a micro dataset from household-level surveys, others use cross-country datasets at the aggregate country level. Both developed and developing countries are considered in the analyses. The thesis begins by exploring the relationship between idiosyncratic income changes and consumption changes of Australian households over the period 2001-2009. A major contribution to the literature is the use of the Household Income and Labor Dynamics of Australia dataset that includes panels on both consumption and income data. For the entire sample of Australian households, nearly full consumption smoothing exists against transitory shocks. Although less consumption smoothing exists against permanent shocks, Australian households still achieve a high degree of consumption smoothing against highly persistent shocks, particularly when compared to households in the United States. Durable purchases, female labor supply, and taxes and transfers are all found to act as consumption-smoothing mechanisms. The thesis then explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive list of macro-level labor-market outcomes, including the unemployment rate, employment levels, average wage index, and labor force participation rates. After documenting the average trends across countries in the labor-market outcomes up to ten years on either side of each country’s reform year, fixed-effects ordinary least squares as well as instrumental variables regressions are performed to account for likely endogeneity of structural reforms to labor-market outcomes. Overall the results suggest that structural reforms lead to positive outcomes for labor, particularly for informal workers. Redistributive effects in favor of workers, along the lines of the Stolper-Samuelson effect, may be at work. The thesis then explores the impact of trade liberalization on macroeconomic estimates of productivity using Brazil as a case study. Trade and economic reforms can affect the price of capital goods relative to other tradable and especially non-tradable goods. If the price of capital investments rises more than the price of all goods and services in the economy, mismeasurement of the price of capital caused by the divergence in these relative prices would result in an overestimated capital stock and underestimated TFP. This chapter overcomes this bias by constructing a capital price index using international trade data on capital goods’ unit values then adjusts the index to reflect domestic Brazilian prices. A significant recovery between 1992 and 2006 is observed, highlighting the important role of the price deflator in growth accounting. The final chapter of this thesis proposes a methodology to measure the vulnerability of a country through exports to fluctuations in the economic activity of foreign markets. Export vulnerability depends first on the overall level of export exposure, measured as the share of exports to a foreign market in gross domestic product, and second on the sensitivity of exports to fluctuations in foreign gross domestic product. This sensitivity is captured by estimating origin-destination specific elasticities of exports with respect to changes in foreign gross domestic product using a gravity model of trade. Although the results suggest differences in elasticity estimates across regions as well as product categories, the principal source of international heterogeneity in export vulnerability results from differences in export exposure to global markets.