Essays in macroeconomics and the economics of higher education.

摘要

The first chapter of this work explores the nature of Taylor-type monetary policy rules. Efforts to empirically fit variants of such rules to past policy must account for a hitherto unacknowledged factor in the conduct of monetary policy: the soundness of the banking sector. Results in this essay demonstrate that proxies for banking sector solvency are, amongst other variables, a reliable predictor of the path of monetary policy over the recent past. Hence, formal adoption of a rule which fails to take into account this factor will represent a significant departure from recent management of monetary policy.; The second chapter of this work models the investment decisions of agents as a process of costly search over projects with uncertain payoffs. In such an environment, wealth endowments critically effect the intensity of search undertaken by agents. This result is coupled with an information externality: agents receive valuable information from investments undertaken by others. As a result, social welfare is decreasing in the relative poverty of low-wealth agents: poor agents make bad searches from a social welfare perspective.; In general, the body of theoretical inquiries into the relationship between aggregate economic growth and the performance of financial systems has traditionally arrived at ambiguous predictions. Recent empirical estimates seem to resolve this ambiguity. Chapter three details a lack of robustness in those results: East Asian economies drive the outcome of hypothesis tests in assumed empirical frameworks.; The final chapter of this work begins by noting that institutions of higher education are increasingly relying upon alumni giving and endowment earnings as sources of funding. Utilizing a new database on average alumni donations at the institutional level and institutional characteristics spanning a fifteen-year horizon, this chapter explores the role that lagged institutional characteristics and policy have on subsequent donations to the institution. Empirical results confirm the non-contemporaneous effects of variations in the average scholastic achievement of matriculated students on subsequent donative revenue flows and, in addition, indirectly address some of the open questions left by previous theoretical inquiries into the economics of higher education.