摘要:
My dissertation focuses on the macroeconomics of emerging and developing nations. This group of economies is characterized by significant differences in terms of institutional quality, financial development, as well as other cultural, social, political parameters. In turn, these structural heterogeneities exert considerable influence on their domestic economic environment, specifically impacting key macroeconomic indicators such as output, investment, consumption, foreign capital flows, exchange rates etc. The first essay is an empirical and theoretical investigation of Business Cycles and Macroeconomic Dynamics in post-independence India. Using annual time series data, we document key business cycle properties of the Indian economy. Output, consumption and investment are more volatile in India compared to its developed country counterparts. As in developed countries, consumption is less volatile and investment is more volatile than output in the Indian data. In contrast, investment is not highly correlated with output in India. Moreover, India's economic landscape has undergone significant changes, both in terms of the absolute level and cyclical fluctuations, across the planning horizon. The presence of structural break is reported for major macroeconomic variables when we decompose the data into pre- and post-reform categories. We also test whether a standard real business cycle (closed economy) model with India-specific parameters can replicate the stylized features of the business cycle. The model includes a tax on capital income which acts as a disincentive for future investment, and the results indicate that a high volatility of the tax shock is required to produce the low investment output correlation. The model performs reasonably well in matching the correlation dynamics observed in the data. In the second essay, I examine Foreign Reserve accumulation in Developing Countries through the lens of Institutional Quality and Financial Development. I investigate