1,720,958 research outputs found
Sources of business cycle fluctuations and financial spillovers
Defence date: 22 May 2015Examining Board: Professor Fabio Canova, EUI, Supervisor; Professor Luca Benati, University of Bern; Professor Luca Gambetti, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona; Professor Evi Pappa, EUI.This thesis studies the importance of non-fundamental factors in economic and financial fluctuations. In particular, it studies how the economy responds to changes in expectations about economic fundamentals, independently of actual changes in those fundamentals, and to what extent financial fluctuations in one country spillover to other countries. The first chapter investigates how the economy reacts to the arrival of news about future technological progress. I find that the economy expands following a so-called news shock, but the bulk of the effect is delayed until technology starts to actually improve. News shocks explain around 30 percent of business cycle fluctuations, while their role is more important for explaining variations in forward-looking variables, such as stock prices and the term spread. In the second chapter, jointly written with Stephane Dées, studies the importance of animal spirits - defined as changes in expectations not supported by changes in fundamentals - for producing business cycles. We find that animal spirits are more important for business cycle fluctuations than permanent shocks. We use a novel identification scheme in a vector-autoregressive framework that exploits the fact that the econometrician has a richer data-set than consumers. In the third chapter, jointly written with Roberto De Santis, studies the extent and direction of spillovers, contagion and connectedness in European and US sovereign debt markets from 2005 to 2014. We use a new method that allows us to identify orthogonal country specific shocks in a panel of countries, employing restrictions on the relative size of the contemporaneous impact effect. We find that connectedness declined steadily between 2009 and 2012, indicating increased financial fragmentation. We find that Greece was a key source of systemic risk in 2010, explaining 20-30% of the variance of sovereign yields in stressed countries, while in 2011-2012 Italy, not Spain, was a key source of systemic risk
Sources of borrowing and fiscal multipliers
We find that debt-financed government spending multipliers vary considerably depending on the location of the debt holder. In a sample of 59 countries we find that government spending multipliers are larger when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to foreign investors (non-residents), compared to the case when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to home investors (residents). In a theoretical model we show that the location of the government debt holder produces these differential responses through the extent that private investment is crowded out in each case. Increasing international capital mobility of the resident private sector decreases the difference between the two types of financing, a prediction, which is also confirmed by the data. The share of rule-of-thumb workers, as well as the strength of the public good in the utility function play a key role in generating model-based fiscal multipliers, which are quantitatively comparable with those of the data
Sources of borrowing and fiscal multipliers
We find that debt-financed government spending multipliers vary considerably depending on the location of the debt holder. In a sample of 59 countries we find that government spending multipliers are larger when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to foreign investors (non-residents), compared to the case when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to home investors (residents). In a theoretical model we show that the location of the government debt holder produces these differential responses through the extent that private investment is crowded out in each case. Increasing international capital mobility of the resident private sector decreases the difference between the two types of financing, a prediction, which is also confirmed by the data. The share of rule-of-thumb workers, as well as the strength of the public good in the utility function play a key role in generating model-based fiscal multipliers, which are quantitatively comparable with those of the data.The ADEMU Working Paper Series is being supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 European Union funding for Research & Innovation, grant agreement No 649396
Animal spirits, fundamental factors and business cycle fluctuations
This paper explores empirically the role of noisy information in cyclical developments and aims at separating fluctuations that are due to genuine changes in fundamentals from those due to temporary animal spirits or expectational errors (noise shocks). Exploiting the fact that the econometrician has a richer data-set in some dimensions than the consumers, we use a novel identification scheme in a structural vector-autoregressive (SVAR) framework. Our results show that noise shocks are more important for business cycle fluctuations than permanent (or technology) shocks. We also show that technology shocks turn negative a few years before recessions, while noise shocks are very positive at the cycle peaks. By contrast, the recovery from recessions is mostly led by technology shocks, noise shocks remaining negative for some time during this business cycle phase
Sources of borrowing and fiscal multipliers
We find that debt-financed government spending multipliers vary considerably depending on the location of the debt holder. In a sample of 59 countries we find that government spending multipliers are larger when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to foreign investors (non-residents), compared to the case when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to home investors (residents). In a theoretical model we show that the location of the government debt holder produces these differential responses through the extent that private investment is crowded out in each case. Increasing international capital mobility of the resident private sector decreases the difference between the two types of financing, a prediction, which is also confirmed by the data. The share of rule-of-thumb workers, as well as the strength of the public good in the utility function play a key role in generating model-based fiscal multipliers, which are quantitatively comparable with those of the data.The ADEMU Working Paper Series is being supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 European Union funding for Research & Innovation, grant agreement No 649396
Sources of borrowing and fiscal multipliers
We find that debt-financed government spending multipliers vary considerably depending on the location of the debt holder. In a sample of 59 countries we find that government spending multipliers are larger when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to foreign investors (non-residents), compared to the case when government purchases are financed by issuing debt to home investors (residents). In a theoretical model we show that the location of the government debt holder produces these differential responses through the extent that private investment is crowded out in each case. Increasing international capital mobility of the resident private sector decreases the difference between the two types of financing, a prediction, which is also confirmed by the data. The share of rule-of-thumb workers, as well as the strength of the public good in the utility function play a key role in generating model-based fiscal multipliers, which are quantitatively comparable with those of the data.The ADEMU Working Paper Series is being supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 European Union funding for Research & Innovation, grant agreement No 649396
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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