This paper aims to conduct a precise test of the political economy hypothesis linking income inequality and economic growth. By choosing covariates from a detailed county-level dataset and assuming that U.S. counties experience perfect capital mobility, I shut off the four possible channels...

The role played by financial intermediaries and banks in modern economies is undeniably critical. However, explaining their importance in a theoretical general equilibrium framework presents some challenges. If firms and households have unrestricted access to complete financial markets, then at...

This thesis consists of three chapters on the impact of different government policies on entrepreneurial financing. In the first chapter, by quantitatively evaluating the impact of different personal bankruptcy regimes on entrepreneurship in a life-cycle model with occupational choices, I...

In this article, the goal is to offer a new research agenda for evolutionary macroeconomics. The article commences with a broad review of the main ideas in the history of thought concerning the determinants of economic growth and an introduction to the evolutionary perspective. This is followed...

The problem of asset price bubbles, and more generally of instability in the financial system, has been a matter of concern since the 1980s but has only recently moved to the center of the macroeconomic policy debate. The main concern with bubbles arises when they burst, imposing losses on...

This paper empirically examines the impact of oil price levels and volatility on key macroeconomic indicators of Indonesia. In particular, two measures of volatility – historical volatility and realized volatility – are utilized and compared for their different macroeconomic impacts. The...

This dissertation asks whether frequency misspecification of a New Keynesian model results in temporal aggregation bias of the Calvo parameter. First, when a New Keynesian model is estimated at a quarterly frequency while the true data generating process is the same but at a monthly...

This dissertation presents two essays on Markov-Switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The first essay is "Perturbation Methods for Markov-Switching Models," which is co-authored with Juan Rubio-Ramirez, Dan Waggoner, and Tao Zha. This essay develops an perturbation-based...

Against the backdrop of shifting views on the role of government in the provision of infrastructure, this paper distinguishes between the payment for and financing of the South African Government's infrastructure investment programme. The paper argues for a clear distinction between loan...

Price stability is widely recognised as the primary goal of modern monetary policy, and the management of private sector inflation expectations has become an essential channel through which this goal is achieved. This evaluation aims to improve the understanding of how the sensitivity of private...