Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis thesis studies questions on macroeconomic shocks and the business cycle using empirical methods. Over three chapters, I study the origins and implications of business cycle behaviour in the United States. My work provides a novel approach to estimating the macroeconomic risks priced in equity markets, suggests an explanation for the business cycle patterns in the cross section of firm outcomes, and sheds new light on the empirical effects of monetary shocks. The first chapter revisits a classic question in macro-finance: Which aspects of macroeconomic risk are priced in equity returns? I provide a flexible approach to estimating the expected distribution of future outcomes for economic growth and use this distribution to construct measures of expected macroeconomic risk. Comparing the asset pricing performance of the different measures, I find that skewness in the expected distribution is strongly priced in the time series and cross section of returns. Stronger downside risks to future economic growth predict higher future excess returns, supporting standard results from consumption-based asset pricing theory. The second chapter studies the origins and implications of a new stylized business cycle fact. Skewness in the cross-sectional distribution of firm sales growth rates is strongly procyclical, meaning recessions are characterized by some firms experiencing disproportionately poor growth. I show that firms' heterogeneous responses to a variety of macroeconomic shocks induce sizeable procyclical skewness in the cross section. Even the cross section of the largest firms in the US economy features skewed responses, such that some very large firms respond surprisingly strongly to aggregate shocks. These firms account for a meaningful fraction of the aggregate response to macroeconomic shocks in the United States. The third chapter is co-authored with Dr Adrian Ochs. We provide a new approach to decompose the causal effects of monetary policy on macroeconomic outcomes into two components: The effect that would prevail under symmetric information between the central bank and the private sector, and the `information channel'. Using a stylized model, we demonstrate that the information channel weakens the response of monetary shocks because a monetary contraction can signal stronger economic growth to the private sector, thereby increasing output expectations and output itself through this channel. We apply natural language processing techniques to approximate the information the private sector can learn from the central bank decision and use it to quantify the strength of the information channel in an empirical strategy motivated by our model. The information channel has sizeable effects on real activity and has become stronger over time, which we argue is due to stronger learning from interest rate decisions.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2024
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Schmitz, Niklas
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Giannitsarou, Chrysi
Subjects
dc:subject × 5Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.112612
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/374597