Essays in macroeconomics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation is composed of three essays in the field of macroeconomics. In the first essay, I look at the relation between the size distribution of manufacturing plants and income levels. The typical size distribution of manufacturing plants in developing countries has a thick left tail compared to developed countries. The same holds across Indian states, with richer states having a much smaller share of their manufacturing employment in small plants. I explore the hypothesis that this income-size relation arises from the fact that low income countries and states have high demand for low quality products which can be produced efficiently in small plants. I provide evidence which is consistent with this hypothesis from both the consumer and producer side. In particular, I show empirically that richer households buy higher price goods while larger plants produce higher price products (and use higher price inputs). I develop a model which matches these cross-sectional facts. The model features non-homothetic preferences with respect to quality on the consumer side. On the producer side, high quality production has higher marginal costs and requires higher fixed costs. These two features imply that high quality producers are larger on average and charge higher prices. The model can explain about forty percent of the cross-state variation in the left tail of manufacturing plants in India. The second essay (joint work with Itay Saporta-Eksten and Edison Yu) considers the role of reduced geographical mobility in explaining the persistently high unemployment rate during and after the Great Recession. One concern during the Great Recession was that the housing bust reduced geographical mobility and prevented workers from moving for job-related reasons. We first characterize flows out of unemployment that are related to geographical mobility and then boost these flows up in counterfactual exercises to construct an upper bound on the effect of mobility on unemployment between 2007 and 2012. The effect of reduced geographical mobility is always small: Using pre-recession mobility rates, decreased mobility can account for only an 11 basis points increase in the unemployment rate over the period. Using dynamics of renter geographical mobility in this period to calculate homeowner counterfactual mobility, delivers similar results. Using the highest mobility rate observed in the data, reduced mobility accounts for only a 33 basis points increase in the unemployment rate. In the last essay, I conduct a model based accounting exercise to estimate the potential growth impact of demographic changes in India between 2010 and 2030. India is expected to see major demographic changes which include a fall in the dependency ratio, changes in age structure within the labor force, and increased urbanization. I develop a model which allows for these different channels of demographic changes and use it to estimate the potential growth impact of these changes.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Kothari, Siddharth |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
| Primary advisor | Klenow, Peter J |
| Thesis advisor | Klenow, Peter J |
| Thesis advisor | Bloom, Nick, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Jones, Charles |
| Advisor | Bloom, Nick, 1973- |
| Advisor | Jones, Charles |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Siddharth Kothari. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Siddharth Kothari
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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