Essays in macro finance and monetary economics

This thesis consists of three essays in the areas of macro finance and monetary economics. The first two essays deal with the analysis of the term structure of interest rates in dynamic and stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. The third essay explores inflation expectations formation across different economic groups in South Africa.     Interest rates are one channel through which monetary policy affects the real economy. Typically, central banks implement monetary policy by influencing short term interest rates. Theoretically, the interest rate on a long-term bond is the average of expected future short term interest rates over the maturity period, plus a risk premium demanded by the holder of the bond to compensate for the risk involved in holding a longer maturity bond. Therefore, any changes in the target rate of the central bank and the risk premium affect long -- term interest rates, such as mortgage rates and interest rates on certain durable goods. It is then important for the central bank to understand the economic factors that affect both components of long - term interest namely the market expectations about the short - term rates and the risk premium. For example, recently in the U.S. economy, between June 2004 and June 2006, the ineffectiveness of monetary policy to affect long - term interest rates has been attributed to a decline in risk premium over this period, which has offset the effect of the increase in the target rate of the Federal Reserve (Fed). In the implementation of its monetary policy, the central bank can more or less control agents' expectations through transparent communication. However, the risk premium is endogenous and unobservable and therefore can not be fully controlled by the central bank. On the other hand, achieving the goal of prices stability in an inflation targeting framework depends on the credibility of the central bank.     In the first two essays I explore the economic factors of the term structure of interest rates and risk premiums. I build a non-linear dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models whereby I incorporate a range of bonds with different maturities. Specifically, the goal of the first essay is to understand the relationship between macroeconomic factors and the level of risk premium in a New Keynesian general equilibrium framework. Uncertainty in the model comes from three sources: productivity, monetary policy and, preferences shocks. The model has two types of real rigidities namely habit formation in preferences and adjustment costs in capital stock. The model is solved by perturbation method up to second order and calibrated to the U.S. economy. Since the risk premium is by nature a compensation for risk, the second - order approximation implies that the risk premium is a linear combination of the volatility of the three shocks. Results show that at the calibrated parameters, real shocks (productivity and preferences) play a more important role in determining the level of the risk premium relative to monetary shocks. I show that, contrary to previous work (where production capital is fixed), the effect of habit formation on the risk premium depends on the degree of capital adjustment cost. When capital adjustment costs are so high that the capital stock is fixed in equilibrium, an increase in the parameter of habit formation leads to an increase in the risk premium. However, when agents can freely adjust the capital stock without cost, the effect of the habit formation parameter on the risk premium is negligible. This result is explained by the fact that when the capital stock can be adjusted without cost, it opens an additional channel to the agents for consumption smoothing. Therefore, the effect of habit formation on the risk premium is reduced. In addition, the results show that the way the central bank conducts its monetary policy has an effect on the risk premium. The more aggressive the central bank vis-à-vis inflation, the lower the risk premium and vice versa. This is due to the fact that when the central bank fights against inflation it leads to a decrease in the variance of inflation. As a result, the risk premium due to inflation risk decreases.     In the second essay, I extend the analysis of the first essay by using recursive preferences (as those proposed by Epstein - Zin) and by allowing the conditional volatility of the shocks to be time - varying. The use of this framework is motivated by two reasons. First, recent studies (Doh, 2010, Rudebusch and Swanson, 2012) showed that these preferences are appropriate for the analysis of asset prices in general equilibrium models. Second, heteroscedasticity is a prominent feature of economic and financial data. This implies that, contrary to the first essay, the uncertainty here is time - varying. Thus, the framework in this essay is more general and realistic than in the first essay. The main objective of this paper is to examine the impact of uncertainty due to conditional volatility of the shocks on the level and the dynamics of interest rates and risk premiums. Since the risk premium is constant at second order approximation, the model is solved by the perturbation method with an approximation of order three in order to get a time - varying risk premium. The advantage of introducing shocks conditional volatilities is that , it induces additional state variables that provide an additional contribution to the dynamics of the risk premium. I show that the risk premiums implied by the third -- order approximate solution have an ARCH-M (Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticty in Mean) type representation as that introduced by Engle, Lilien and Robins (1987). The difference is that in this model the parameters are structural and the volatilities are conditional volatility of economic shocks and not those of the variables themselves. I estimate the model parameters by Simulated Method of Moments (SMM) using U.S. data. The estimation results show that there is evidence of stochastic volatility in the three shocks. Moreover, the contribution of conditional shocks volatility to the level and the dynamics of the risk premium is significant. In particular, the effects of the conditional volatility of productivity and preferences shocks are important. The conditional volatility of the productivity shock contributes positively to the means and standard deviations of risk premiums. These contributions vary with the maturity of the bonds. Conditional volatility of the preferences shock contributes negatively to the averages and positively to the variances of risk premiums. As for the impact of volatility of monetary policy shock, its impact on the risk premium is negligible.     The third article (coauthored with Eric Schaling and Alain Kabundi, revised and resubmitted to the journal of Economic Modelling) deals with heterogeneity in inflation expectations of different economic agents and its impact on monetary policy in South Africa. The main question is to examine whether different groups of economic agents form their inflation expectations in the same way and if they perceive the central bank (South African Reserve Bank) monetary policy in the say way. We specify an inflation expectation model that allows us to directly test whether inflation expectations are anchored or not to the inflation target band (3% - 6%). The data used are inflation expectations data from surveys conducted by the central bank. There are three groups of agents: financial analysts, businesses and trade unions. We therefore exploits the panel structure of the data to test the heterogeneity in inflation expectations and derive their perceived inflation targets. Results show that there is evidence of heterogeneity in the way the three groups form their expectations. The expectations of financial analysts are well anchored to the central bank target band while those of businesses and trade unions are not. In fact, businesses and trade unions put a higher weight on lagged realized inflation in their expectations. This Indicates a lack of full credibility of the central bank.

Keyphrases: Arch-m, Dsge, Term structure, Inflation expectations, Risk premium