关键词：
Dynamic General Equilibrium
Macroeconomics
Economics
摘要：
This dissertation, titled “Essays on Dynamic Macroeconomics” is comprised of three papers which share the common ground of employing tools of modern dynamic macroeconomics. All the three papers apply modern technical tools of macroeconomics in dynamic environments to different macroeconomic problems and observations, develop mechanisms and models to account for these observations and finally test explanatory powers of the provided mechanisms. The first paper, titled “Political Turnover, Taxes, and the Shadow Economy” is motivated from several cross-section empirical studies which argue that a higher tax burden or different indicators of statutory tax rates are associated with a smaller informal economy. In the paper I show that the turnover of governments provides the key to understanding this relation. To this end, I present evidence that once political turnover is controlled for, the data shows no association between the tax burden and the size of the informal economy. This result is empirically robust in a panel data consisting of 80 countries and 5 years. To account for this observation, I develop a dynamic political economy model with two political parties alternating in office. In equilibrium, if the incumbent party faces a higher probability of staying in office, it sets a higher tax rate to invest more in productive public capital, while spending less for current office rent. I argue that public capital is mainly utilized by the formal sector and this implies that countries in which incumbent parties are more likely to stay in power, have a higher tax burden but a smaller informal sector. Finally, I compare the model against the data and present evidence that my theory is consistent with empirical observations. In the second paper, titled ”A Theory of Economic Development with Endogenous Fertility”, I integrate two existing theories of economic development to account for the time-series evolution of output, fertility and population in transition through the
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