A Treatise on Policy Analysis: Immigration Policy, Monetary Policy, and Market Distortions.

摘要

This manuscript consists of a trio of policy studies that examine the effect of US government policy on individual agents as well as companies and markets as a whole. The policies analyzed span topics that are traditionally the purview of microeconomics (immigration policy and housing policy), albeit with attention paid to the contemporaneous macroeconomic environment at times, as well as prototypical macroeconomic topics (monetary policy).;The first chapter contains an analysis of the effect that immigration policy changes instituted after the September 11th terrorist attacks had on the observed drop in the number of foreign science and engineering graduate students coming to study in the United States. Leveraging National Science Foundation and National Center for Education Statistics data as well as various macroeconomic indicators, I was able to decompose the observed drop in foreign student enrollment into both a policy impact and a business cycle effect.;Chapter 2 looks at a period of high and volatile worldwide inflation coupled with dovish monetary policy throughout the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a rapid transition to a period of low inflation and stable output coupled with a more aggressive hawkish monetary policy regime throughout the developed world. Using a set of New Keynesian DSGE models which are not restricted to the determinacy region of the parameter space, I find that the observed shift in monetary policy regimes could potentially explain a persistent reduction in inflation.;Beginning in 1992, congress stipulated that a specific portion of the mortgage loan purchases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) must contain loans made to borrowers from certain market segments that were deemed to be underserved by traditional mortgage lending. Chapter 3 uses a very rich loan-level GSE dataset to determine both whether or not the GSEs had the capability to evaluate the risk of expanding their eligibility thresholds to meet the goal targets, as well as how the GSEs could have used the tools at their disposal to meet the housing goals in a more efficient manner.