Resumen de Assajos de macroeconomia aplicada
This PhD thesis contains three chapters in the field of applied macroeconomics.
Chapter I studies the effects of conventional and unconventional monetary policy shocks on inequality and the distributions of income and wealth in the United States. This chapter reflects solely my own work. Using survey data to construct measures of inequality and the distribution and macroeconometric techniques, I show that a rise in the federal funds rate leads to a short-run increase in total, labor and financial income inequality, while financial wealth inequality increases more persistently. The effects appear sizeable, highly heterogeneous across different percentiles of the distribution, and characterized by a larger negative response of its lower tail. An increase in asset purchases leads to a fall in financial wealth, total and labor income inequality, while financial income inequality increases. These effects appear less heterogeneous and seem to benefit mostly the bottom of the distribution. Overall, the findings suggest that the transmission mechanisms of conventional and unconventional actions are potentially different.
Chapter II studies the macroeconomic effects of net migration shocks in Germany. This paper is joint work with Eugenia Vella. Using SVAR techniques, we show that migration shocks are expansionary, increasing persistently industrial production, per capita net exports and tax revenue. In the labor market, they boost job vacancies and hourly wages in manufacturing. Unemployment falls for natives, driving a decline in total unemployment, while it rises for foreigners. Using quarterly data in a mixed-frequency SVAR, we shed light on the employment and participation responses for natives and foreigners. We find that these all increase in response to migration shocks, highlighting a job-creation effect for natives and a job-competition effect for foreigners. Our analysis also disentangles the effects of job-related migration from OECD countries and migration (including refugees) from less advanced economies and uncovers heterogenous effects.
Chapter III studies the main drivers behind the decline of the labor share of income in the United states. This paper is joint work with Drago Bergholt and Francesco Furlanetto. We estimate a SVAR model to evaluate the relative importance of four main explanations for the decline of the US labor income share: (i) rising market power of firms, (ii) falling market power of workers, (iii) higher investment-specific technology growth, and (iv) the widespread emergence of automation or robotization in production processes. We identify the SVAR using sign restrictions imposed at medium-run horizons, derived from a stylized macroeconomic model of structural change. We show that automation is the main driver of the long-run labor share. Firms' rising markups can, however, account for a significant part of the accelerating labor share decline observed in the last 20 years. Our results also point to complementarity between labor and capital, thus ruling out capital deepening as a major force behind declining labor shares.
