D - Microeconomics
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November 19, 2015
A Survey of Consumer Expectations for Canada
The Bank of Canada recently launched a quarterly survey to measure the expectations of Canadian households: the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE). The data collected provide comprehensive information about consumer expectations for and uncertainty about inflation, the labour market and household finance. This article describes the CSCE and illustrates its potential to offer rich information about Canadian consumers for researchers and policy-makers. -
Heterogeneity in the Dynamic Effects of Uncertainty on Investment
How does aggregate profit uncertainty influence investment activity at the firm level? We propose a parsimonious adaptation of a factor-autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to exploit information in a subindustry sales panel for an efficient and tractable estimation of aggregate volatility. -
Risk Sharing in the Presence of a Public Good
This paper studies an economy where agents can spend resources on consuming a private good and on funding a public good. There is asymmetric information regarding agents’ relative preference for private versus public good consumption. -
Managerial Compensation Duration and Stock Price Manipulation
I build a model of optimal managerial compensation where managers each have a privately observed propensity to manipulate short-term stock prices. -
Exploring Differences in Household Debt Across Euro Area Countries and the United States
We use internationally comparable household-level data for ten euro area economies and the United States to investigate cross-country differences in debt holdings and the potential of debt overhang. -
A Wake-Up-Call Theory of Contagion
We propose a novel theory of financial contagion. We study global coordination games of regime change in two regions with an initially uncertain correlation of regional fundamentals. -
Information, Risk Sharing and Incentives in Agency Problems
This paper studies the use of information for incentives and risk sharing in agency problems. When the principal is risk neutral or the outcome is contractible, risk sharing is unnecessary or completely taken care of by a contract on the outcome. -
A New Data Set of Quarterly Total Factor Productivity in the Canadian Business Sector
In this paper, a quarterly growth-accounting data set is built for the Canadian business sector with the top-down approach of Diewert and Yu (2012). Inputs and outputs are measured and used to estimate the quarterly total factor productivity (TFP). -
International Spillovers of Policy Uncertainty
Using the Baker et al. (2013) index of policy uncertainty for six developed countries, this paper estimates spillovers of policy uncertainty. We find that spillovers account for slightly more than one-fourth of the dynamics of policy uncertainty in these countries, with this share rising to one-half during the financial crisis.