Browsing by Author "Tavani, Daniele, advisor"
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Item Open Access Bitcoin price formation: an empirical investigation(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Light, Aric, author; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Pena, Anita, committee member; Kroll, Stephan, committee memberCreated in 2008 and rising to prominence in 2017, Bitcoin continues to generate controversy as to whether it is a speculative asset or the harbinger of a future of global, decentralized commerce. The focus of this paper is to investigate the properties of Bitcoin and its market by assessing asset specific factors (users, hash rate, etc.) and traditional market factors (market risk, currency risk, etc.). The objective is to quantify the impacts of these forces as drivers of Bitcoin returns and to develop a risk measurement framework with the potential to inform future use cases. The analysis is broken out into two parts. The first seeks to quantify the impact of asset specific "supply and demand" factors with respect to Bitcoin's daily price return and volatility and to determine the relative efficiency of the nascent Bitcoin market. To do this a GARCH model is specified which enables the measurement of return impacts and volatility within a single model. A back test and forecast are then conducted to determine if the conditional value at risk and expected shortfall can be accurately captured by the model. We determine the Bitcoin market is weakly efficient, returns are highly impacted by supply and demand factors and that the specified value at risk model accurately describes the exceptional volatility. The second part incorporates a set of macro-financial variables into the model to determine Bitcoin's exposure to traditional sources of risk; such as stock and currency market returns. The results show that Bitcoin is largely unimpacted by broad macro-financial variables once supply and demand variables are properly accounted for. This suggests that although Bitcoin is a weakly efficient market it is generally disconnected from worldwide capital and currencies market. This further suggests that Bitcoin may have currently limited "real world" use cases which is an important consideration for investors.Item Open Access Essays on regional economic development: finance, growth, and income distribution(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Petach, Luke, author; Pena, Anita Alves, advisor; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Weiler, Stephan, committee member; Opp, Susan, committee memberThis dissertation explores the relationship between financial markets and economic activity across regions within the United States. In particular, it examines how regional variation in financial markets may affect variables that play an important role in regional economic growth and income distribution. Despite the way the Great Recession of 2007-2009 made manifest the importance of financial markets in the determination of real economic outcomes, there is still much that is not understood about the relationship between financial markets and the rest of the economy. Financial markets may affect household decision making either indirectly via their influence over institutional arrangements and social norms, or directly via their influence over who can obtain access to the credit needed to start a business, purchase a home, or invest in human capital. These changes will alter the distribution of income—both directly via the re-distribution of funds through credit markets, and indirectly via the outcomes that access to credit (or lack there-of) engender.Item Open Access Essays on secular stagnation, income and wealth distribution, and employment(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Cruz Luzuriaga, Manuel David, author; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Vasudevan, Ramaa, advisor; Braunstein, Elissa, committee member; Koontz, Stephen, committee memberAfter the publication of Piketty's Capital in the XXI Century and Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth, mainstream economics has shifted its attention to the distribution of income and wealth and how they interact with economic growth. This dissertation focuses on the interaction between distribution and secular stagnation, as well as the ultimate long run effects on employment at the macro level. The first chapter empirically investigates the short -and long- run interaction between labor productivity and real wages and their ultimate impact on the labor market for a panel of 25 OECD countries. The second chapter presents a theoretical and empirical model of secular stagnation, income and wealth distribution, and employment in the Classical-Marxian tradition. In this model, institutional or technological shocks to income distribution lower the wage share, increase wealth inequality, and decrease the income-capital ratio in the long run. The ultimate effect on long run employment depends on the relative strength of the response of labor-augmenting technical change vis-à -vis the response of real wage growth to labor market institutions. An empirical test of the model using time-series data for the US (1960-2019) appears to support its main implications. The third chapter extends the second chapter's model by endogenizing the growth rate of the labor force to employment in an open economy. The model is more appropriate for economies at the low or middle stages of development, where the labor force depends significantly on demographic factors like high variations in the birth rate or immigration. I then empirically test the model using time-series data from China (1990-2019) and India (1970-2019) to validate the framework.Item Open Access Three essays on gender inequality in Latin America: understanding labor market segregation, job quality, and environmental issues from a feminist perspective(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Machado Nunes, Débora, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee member; Barber, Edward B., committee memberFor the past three decades, Latin America experienced remarkable progress in educational attainment and health care access for women, combined with decreasing household income inequality and higher wages across the board since 2002, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution for most countries. Yet, gender job segregation in the labor market has increased since the early 1990s. Urban women persistently occupy jobs in the informal sector, where jobs are generally characterized by low wages, lack of benefits, poor working conditions, and no promotion possibilities. Concerning both urban and rural women is Latin America's unique vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and the lack of progress in preventing deforestation, which disproportionally impacts impoverished communities, especially women and children. Despite some progress on reproductive rights in several countries, persistent economic challenges and constraints present serious barriers to the advancement of gender equality and reproductive justice—understood as the right to prevent and terminate undesired pregnancies, carry desired pregnancies, and raise a healthy and happy child to the best of one's ability. Based on the premise that such a complex scenario can only be understood through feminist research methodologies, this dissertation proposes three independent yet connected essays. Each essay focuses on a different research question that helps us better understand the gendered impacts of economic policies in Latin America, how women with different intersectional identities are impacted by them, and how to build useful scholarship for policy makers and activists to advance gender equality and reproductive justice in the region. The first essay focuses on the connections between gender job segregation, income distribution, and real exchange rates in Latin America. For the second essay, we propose a theoretical discussion, focusing on building reproductive justice as a research program within economics. Finally, the third essay focuses on rural women, exploring the relationship between deforestation and hours unpaid care work in the Amazonia rainforest.Item Open Access Three essays on informalization(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Gálvez GarcÃa, Jose Rolando, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Vasudevan, Ramaa, committee member; Zaharan, Sammy, committee member; Velasco, Marcela, committee memberThis dissertation uses informalization as a way to identify workers and enterprises that engage in low-productivity, or contingent economic activities, and are systemically excluded from the costs and benefits of social welfare. Informalization represents a serious challenge for inclusive development in many economies around the world, particularly those in Latin America. The first chapter uses a political economy perspective to argue for adopting institutional approaches to conceptualize and understand informalization in order to account for the structural, exclusionary, and discriminatory dimensions of this development challenge. Adopting a macroeconomic perspective, chapter two analyzes the association between real exchange rates and the extent of urban informal employment in multiple Latin American economies in recent decades. Results indicate that real exchange rate competitiveness is associated with lower levels of urban informal employment in the region. The third chapter, taking a microeconomic approach, explores differences between formal and informal enterprises in Guatemala, and how these differences impact output and labor productivity.Item Open Access Three essays on the effect of domestic inequality and global inequality on economic growth(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Barasi, Fathalla, author; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Kling, Robert, advisor; Cutler, Harvey, committee member; Kroll, Stephan, committee memberIn the preface to his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817; 1951, p. 5), David Ricardo wrote that the determination of laws of distribution is the principal problem in Political Economy. One of the political economy concerns (normative economics) is the application of economic policies to maintain specific goals based on observation or economic theory describing (positive economics). Ricardo's statement points to the importance of income distribution for economic growth and implies that understanding the relationship between income distribution and economic growth is crucial for policymakers. These three essays aim to contribute to the existing literature on the effects of domestic and global inequality in income distribution on growth. By developing a theoretical model, the first paper attempts to capture the effect of domestic inequality on economic growth in a closed economy without government. The main novelty is modeling the adjustment between aggregate demand and aggregate supply when there is disequilibrium due to inequality in income distribution: such adjustment occurs via the economy's aggregate saving rate. The saving rate adjustment to disequilibrium results in an inverted U-shaped relationship between domestic inequality and growth, which has important implications for growth theory and policy. The second paper investigates recent global inequality trends by isolating its two components: between- and within-countries inequality and investigating their relationship with globalization. The main finding is that the recent decline in global inequality is mostly due to the decline in between-country inequality due mainly to the growth in income per capita for the most populated countries in the world (especially China & India). Although between-country inequality has decreased, within-country inequality has increased over the sample period. The recent increase in globalization is the main reason for the decrease in inequality between countries and the increased within-country inequality. By using a large panel dataset comprising almost all the countries globally, the third paper provides a further empirical investigation. First, it confirms the hump-shaped relation between domestic inequality and growth. Second, it finds a negative effect of international inequality on real output and consequently on demand for imports. Third, the latter result has implications on the effect of global inequality on economic growth, thus providing a further evaluation of the export-led growth hypothesis.Item Open Access Why prices matter: terms-of-trade, structural change, and development(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Duvall-Pelham, Alexander, author; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Vasudevan, Ramaa, advisor; Braunstein, Elissa, committee member; Cavalieri, Renzo, committee memberTo view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.