Essays in Macroeconomics

• Department of Economics

Thesis Defence: "Essays in Macroeconomics" by Jan Teresiński.

In the first two chapters we analyze the impact of an increase in transfers - i.e., fiscal stimulus in a form of direct payments to individuals - on budget deficits.

In the first chapter we show that in a model with the cash-in-advance constraint and downward nominal wage rigidity transfers are largely self-financing.

In the second chapter we estimate the impulse response functions of macroeconomic variables to an increase in transfers and show that such increase seems to be not only self-financing, but actually reducing debt in the high-unemployment regime.

The third chapter is related to a different topic: we analyze how the terms of trade (TOT) - the ratio of export prices to import prices - affect total factor productivity (TFP). We provide empirical evidence suggesting that the TOT improvements slow down the TFP growth and a model in which higher TOT shift resources from R&D towards goods production.