Mardi | 2017-06-13 16h00-17h20 en salle des thèses Armen HOVAKIMIAN – Gayané HOVAKIMIAN We investigate the dynamics of observed and target leverage ratios and deviations from the targets. The cross-sectional persistence in observed leverage ratios is driven by highly persistent targets, whereas the time series variation is driven by transitory deviations from targets. Deviations are less persistent for firms that are over-levered and firms that are smaller, younger, focused, or have lower credit ratings. In recessions, excess leverage is less […]

Mardi | 2017-05-30 16h00-17h20 en salle des thèses Olivier CARDI – Peter CLAEYS – Romain RESTOUT This paper develops a two-sector open economy model with imperfect mobility of labor across sectors in order to account for time-series evidence on the aggregate and sectoral effects of a government spending shock. Using a panel of sixteen OECD countries over the period 1970-2007, our VAR evidence shows that a rise in government consumption i) increases hours worked and GDP and produces a simultaneous […]

Mardi | 2017-05-23 16h00-17h20 salle des thèses Christian BROWNLEES – Regis BARNICHON Vector Autoregressions (VAR) and Local Projections (LP) are well established methodologies for the estimation of Impulse Responses (IR). These techniques have complementary features: The VAR approach is more efficient when the model is correctly specified whereas the LP approach is less efficient but more robust to model misspecification. We propose a novel IR estimation methodology – Smooth Local Projections (SLP) – to strike a balance between these approaches. […]

Mardi | 2017-05-16 16h00-17h20 salle des thèses Xavier D’HAULTFOEUILLE – Clément DE CHAISEMARTIN Difference-in-differences (DID) is a method to evaluate the effect of a treatment. In its basic version, a  » control group » is untreated at two dates, whereas a  » treatment group » becomes fully treated at the second date. However, in many applications of the DID method, the treatment rate only increases more in the treatment group. In such fuzzy designs, a popular estimator of treatment effects is the […]

Mardi | 2017-05-09 16h00-17h20 salle des thèses Ghislain DELEPLACE The integration of money in Ricardo’s theory of value and distribution is realised in Principles and the 1819-1823 papers by putting the standard of money centre stage. This raises two questions: Is money a commodity ? Is the standard of money (gold bullion) a commodity? The paper offers a negative answer to the first and a qualified positive one to the second. In Ricardo’s mature theory of money, in which the […]

Mardi | 2017-05-02 Salle des thèses de 16h00 à 17h20 A multi-period setting is studied in which a consumer incurs intermittent waiting costs until the consumption date. The way future utility is discounted satisfies (i) a preference for early consumption, but only during waiting periods when future consumption is reminded, and (ii) indifference between early and late consumption in non-reminding periods in which people are distracted away from future gratifications. With some additional hypotheses including exponential discounting of waiting costs, […]

Mardi | 2017-04-25 16h00-17h20 salle des thèses Isabelle CHORT – Maëlys DE LA RUPELLE This paper uses state-level migration flow data between Mexico and the U.S. from 1999 to 2011 to investigate the migration response to climate shocks and the mitigating impact of an agricultural cash-transfer program (PROCAMPO) and a disaster fund (Fonden). Our results suggest that droughts increase undocumented migration. Fonden amounts are found to mitigate the effect of climate shocks by lowering the undocumented migration response to precipitation […]

Mardi | 2017-04-11 16h00-17h20 salle des thèses Yannick LUCOTTE – Aurélien LEROY This paper empirically assesses the effects of competition in the financial sector on credit procyclicality by estimating both an interacted panel VAR (IPVAR) model using macroeconomic data and a single-equation model with bank-level European banking data. The findings of these two empirical approaches highlight that an exogenous deviation of actual GDP from potential GDP leads to greater credit fluctuation in economies where (i) competition among banks and (ii) […]

Mardi | 2017-04-04 Salle des thèses de 16h00 à 17h20 VOLKER NITSCH – TIBOR BESEDEš – STEFAN GOLDBACH Sanctions restrict cross-border interactions and, therefore, not only put political and economic pressure on the target country, but they also adversely affect the sender country. This paper examines the effect of financial sanctions on the country imposing them. In particular, we analyze the business responses of German non-financial entities to the imposition of sanctions, using highly disaggregated, monthly data from the German […]

Mercredi | 2017-03-29 B103 12h30 Leonardo Eric CALCAGNO In recent years, Argentina has reached nearly universal retirement benefits coverage. This was achieved through two successive pension moratoriums, implemented in the third quarter of 2006 and the third quarter of 2014, which allowed buying back missing contribution years and retire even with incomplete careers. In principle, the effect of moratoriums on unregistered employment is unclear: they may discourage retirement contributions by opening an alternative way for retiring, but they also may […]