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Essays on business cycles in open economies

University of British Columbia

This dissertation consists of three chapters about business cycles in open economies. The first chapter addresses the question of why housing investment is so volatile, especially in economies with developed mortgage markets. To this end, the chapter develops an augmented Real Business Cycle model with a housing collateral constraint. The collateral constraint creates a link between the housing market and borrowing capacity, a link that amplifies the response of housing demand to shocks and becomes stronger in economies with deeper mortgage markets. The second chapter examines an anomaly between international business cycle models and empirical evidence in cross-country employment correlation. It shows that the wealth effect on leisure plays a determining role in generating a negative employment comovement in the models, hence proposing a solution to the anomaly. The last chapter compares macroeconomic consequences of dollarized emerging countries under two alternative monetary policies: the inflation targeting rule and the fixed exchange rate regime. It shows that the floating exchange rate regime can be dominated by the fixed exchange rate regime in the role of cushioning shocks and in welfare terms.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-10-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/14202

Economics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/