Essays on economic aspects of technological growth and globalization.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation studies economic aspects of technological progress and globalization. Chapter 2 studies the impact of productivity growth change on the inflation-unemployment tradeoff resulting from slowly adjusting expectations. This slow adjustment could explain the impact of productivity growth change on the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, as observed in the US in late 1990s. The productivity growth change should result in a corresponding change of labor income growth; however, if expectations adjust slowly, the income growth adjustment could be insufficient. This could result in inflation or unemployment changes. Our estimations of the Phillips curve with unexpected productivity growth support this idea.;Chapter 3 tests the impact of product standards on international trade. We use a gravity model to examine the impact of EU standards on African textiles and agricultural exports, sectors of particular development interest. We had robust evidence that standards raiuce African exports of these products. We address the problem of endogeneity, where products that are highly traded are also subject to an increased number of standards due to protectionist purposes. We estimate separately the impact of EU standards which are harmonized to international standards and should be exogenous and separately the impact of internal EU standards. We also conclude that efforts to harmonize national standards with international norms promise concrete benefits through trade expansion.;Chapter 4 studies consequences of monetary integration in Europe for financial markets. In particular we study jump components (defined as discontinuous or sharp price changes) in the volatility of prices of financial assets before and after the introduction of the Euro in 1999. We study evolution of correlations of the estimated jump components across the markets, depending on their distribution. We find that the introduction of the Euro increased co-movement of jumps in financial markets in the participating countries compared to other markets. We find that effect is much stronger for fixed income than equity instruments (as expected). We associate the changes with integration of monetary policymaking in the Euro area countries.