251 research outputs found
Replication Data and Code for: Tracking Technical Change: Past, Present & Future
No full textThe data and programs replicate tables and figures from "Tracking Technical Change: Past, Present & Future", by Alexopoulos and Cohen. Please see the ReadMe file for additional details
Replication data for: The Media is the Measure: Technical Change and Employment, 1909-49
No full textAlexoopoulos, Michelle, and Cohen, Jon, (2016) "The Media is the Measure: Technical Change and Employment, 1909-49." Review of Economics and Statistics 98:4, 792-809
Replication data for: The Media is the Measure: Technical Change and Employment, 1909-49
No full textAlexoopoulos, Michelle, and Cohen, Jon, (2016) "The Media is the Measure: Technical Change and Employment, 1909-49." Review of Economics and Statistics 98:4, 792-809
Management Matters
No full textNew indications of managerial innovations are created and then used to show that changes in organizational technologies are an important source of economic growth. Specifically, the analysis demonstrates that, first, in response to a positive managerial technology shock, output, productivity and hours significantly increase in the short run, second, these types of innovations are as important as non-managerial ones in explaining movements in these variables at business cycle frequencies, and, third, product and process innovations promote the development of new managerial techniques.Business Cycles; Productivity; Management techniques; Technical Change
Read All About it!! What happens following a technology shock?
No full textExisting indicators of technical change are plagued by shortcomings. I present here new measures based on books published in the field of technology that resolve many of these problems and use them to identify the impact of technology shocks on economic activity. They are positively linked to changes in R&D and scientific knowledge and capture the new technologies' commercialization dates. Changes in information technology are found to be important sources of economic fluctuations in the post-WWII period and total factor productivity, investment and, to a lesser extent, labor are all shown to increase following a positive technology shock.business cycles, technical change, information technologies
More Than Words: Fed Chairs’ Communication During Congressional Testimonies—Supplementary Material
No full textSupplementary material for "More Than Words: Fed Chairs’ Communication During Congressional Testimonies" by Michelle Alexopoulos, Xinfen Han, Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Xu Zhang (Journal of Monetary Economics, 2023)THIS DATASET IS ARCHIVED AT DANS/EASY, BUT NOT ACCESSIBLE HERE. TO VIEW A LIST OF FILES AND ACCESS THE FILES IN THIS DATASET CLICK ON THE DOI-LINK ABOV
Effect of corrosion-induced hydrogen embrittlement and its degradation impact on tensile properties and fracture toughness of (Al-Cu-Mg) 2024 alloy
No full textAbstractIn the present work, the effect of artificial ageing of AA2024-T3 on the tensile mechanical properties and fracture toughness degradation due to corrosion exposure will be investigated. Tensile and fracture toughness specimens were artificially aged to tempers that correspond to Under-Ageing (UA), Peak-Ageing (PA) and Over-Ageing (OA) conditions and then were subsequently exposed to exfoliation corrosion environment. The corrosion exposure time was selected to be the least possible according to the experimental work of Alexopoulos et al. (2016) so as to avoid the formation of large surface pits, trying to simulate the hydrogen embrittlement degradation only. The mechanical test results show that minimum corrosion-induced decrease in elongation at fracture was achieved for the peak-ageing condition, while maximum was noticed at the under-ageing and over-ageing conditions. Yield stress decrease due to corrosion is less sensitive to tempering; fracture toughness decrease was sensitive to ageing heat treatment thus proving that the S΄ particles play a significant role on the corrosion-induced degradation
Information, Central Bank Communication, and Aggregate Fluctuations
No full textThis thesis examines two closely related issues: (1) the ability of imperfect information models to explain some aspects of business cycle dynamics, and (2) the interaction between central bank communications and monetary policy. These issues are related because central bank communications can only be studied in models with imperfect information.
In chapter 1, I investigate the ability of a noisy rational expectations model to generate plausible macroeconomic dynamics. The model allows for imperfect, heterogeneous information, and signal extraction from endogenous variables. I find that imperfect information significantly improves the model's ability to generate persistent, hump-shaped responses to a transitory monetary policy shock. This is achieved without the need for mechanical frictions. In addition, the model generates realistic inflation forecast errors.
Chapter 2 explores the relationship between central bank statements about future policy and the degree of commitment. I allow the central bank to make (possibly vague) statements about its expected future policy. I begin by assuming that the central bank adopts a loss function which internalizes the bygone costs of deviating from such a pre-announced policy action. The resulting policy is a convex combination of pure discretion and full commitment. As the precision of central bank statements increases, this policy converges to the full commitment policy. I then show that this type of commitment to internalize bygone costs is sustainable only for moderate degrees of precision.
Chapter 3 studies the impact of central bank communications about the state of the economy. In particular, I examine the extent to which increased central bank transparency creates a meaningful trade-off between beneficially conveying fundamental information and adversely contaminating observed data with the central bank's opinion. This question is addressed in a variant of the model from chapter 1. In this environment, both the central bank and private agents learn about the state of the economy from observations of endogenous variables. By making the central bank learn from endogenous variables, I am able to study the impact of communications precision on the bank's signal extraction problem.Ph
Thesis on the Canadian Housing Market
No full textThe housing market in Canada has experienced notable price growths over the past two decades, especially in gateway cities such as Toronto between 2013 and 2017, which was characterized by rapid property value appreciation and high sales turnovers. The rapidly rising property prices have contributed to a housing crisis. To address the affordability issue, it is critical to understand the underlying causes of the exuberance. This thesis seeks to contribute to such knowledge.
Chapter 1 provides a scoping review of academic and policy studies that examine the determining factors of the Canadian residential real estate price movements between 2000 and 2019. Using a text-mining search and processing algorithm on relevant articles, it shows that the fundamentals, policies and regulations, foreign ownership and immigration are among the top research priorities in relevant Canadian literature. These topics reflect the historical and socioeconomic environment in Canada. Chapter 1 further reviews these studies in detail and identifies research gaps that are addressed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 respectively.
Despite the strong public and policy interests in foreign ownership, quantitative estimates of its influences have been limited, especially for the period of 2013 - 2017 when cross-boarder purchases were widely perceived as one of the main drivers of the sky-rocketing housing prices in some regions. Chapter 2 fills this gap by quantifying the influences of increased foreign real estate investment demand and low interest rates on the Toronto housing market. I use a general equilibrium model which is calibrated to Toronto statistical moments, and perform counterfactual exercises by feeding into the model the June 2013 - April 2017 levels of foreign investment shock and interest rate shock respectively. The results show foreign investment influx at the time raised home prices by 2.2% - 4.9%, whereas lower interest rates increased home prices by 9.0% - 20.8%. Between the two, the low interest rate effects dominated the foreign investment effects, contributing to over 80% of the composite influence. My findings suggest that foreign investment was not a major contributing factor to surging property prices in Toronto during the time examined, contrary to mainstream beliefs. In comparison, low interest rates accounted for a substantial fraction of the observed price appreciation. Furthermore, the results suggest that historically low interest rates worsen homeownership inequality by generating cross-sectional heterogeneous effects: while high-income households take advantage of low interest rates and drive up property demand, low-income households are disproportionately priced out of homeownership.
Meanwhile, although there is evidence that expectations and sentiment are important in home price movements and they warrant attentions from policy makers and researchers, there lacks a measure of housing market sentiment that has a sufficiently long time series and available at the sub-provincial level. To address this gap, I construct a text-based sentiment index to approximate housing market expectations, which measures the relative tone in regional newspaper articles that focuses on residential real estate. I examine the relationship between the sentiment index and local home price movements and investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on this relationship. The results show that the media sentiment has statistically significant but short- lived predictive effects on future home price growth, while it is also influenced by cumulative price appreciations in the recent past. However, this relationship has significantly weakened between 2020 and 2022.Ph.D
Essays on Business Cycles, Banks, and Money
No full textThis thesis studies the relationship between business cycles, banks, and money. The first chapter focuses on the relationship between bank credit supply and economic volatility. I build a DSGE model with nominal and financial frictions. The novel aspect of the model is the banking sector which finances its lending activity with both pre-accumulated household savings and deposits that are created—ex nihilo—by the banking sector. I contribute to the literature by studying the relative importance of bank credit supply shocks in driving economic volatility. The model is estimated using US data. There are three main results of this chapter. First, I find that an unexpected contraction in the supply of bank credit leads to an economic recession. Second, bank credit supply shocks account for 55% of the volatility in investment and GDP. Third, the model can replicate two stylized facts previous models failed to capture: bank net worth is sticky and bank leverage is procyclical.
In the second chapter I focus on the Canadian banking sector. The first half of the chapter provides a brief historical account of the development of the banking system in Canada and makes comparisons with the development of the US banking system. The second half of the chapter uses detailed bank-level balance sheet data of the Big Five Canadian banks to tease out six stylized facts of the Canadian banking sector. They are: first, it is dominated by five large banks; second, credit is deepening; third, net worth is ‘sticky’; fourth, leverage is procyclical; fifth, balance sheet risk is falling; and sixth, rising bank output is driven by liquid liabilities.
In the third chapter I estimate a bank credit supply shock using both firm and bank qualitative survey data regarding lending/borrowing conditions in the Canadian economy. The survey data is purged of factors which also affect loan demand. Using a monetary VAR model, I find that an unexpected one-standard-deviation contraction of bank credit supply leads to a mild economic recession. Moreover, I find that the results are robust to a variety of specifications and a different identification strategy.Ph.D
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