Three essays on microeconomics, macroeconomics, and institutional economics
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This dissertation explores various topics in microeconomics, macroeconomics and institutional economics in developing countries and the United States. The first essay empirically examines the differential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on household microeconomic resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is crucial in developing regions where there is limited access to the COVID-19 vaccine, and the social protection systems are inadequate to protect the most vulnerable populations from the harsh realities of economic shocks. In Sub-Saharan Africa where the pandemic has been less pervasive, the incidence of food insecurity, vulnerability, and ultimately poverty, is expected to increase. The severity of the pandemic on overall welfare depends on the resilience of microeconomic units - particularly households - to cope and recover from the shocks created by the pandemic. The second essay explores the impact of property rights protection on pro-poor economic growth in low-income countries. When property rights are ill-defined and insecure, individuals cannot readily convert their assets to capital or use their assets as collateral to secure loans that can be invested back into the economy. As a result, capital formation and economic growth are constrained. This paper contributes to literature by exploring the impact of secure property rights on pro-poor economic growth. I do this by examining the effects of property rights protection on the income shares held by the poorest to the richest quintiles. The third essay tests the predictive ability of consumer and business confidence on the growth trajectory of U.S. national activity. I disaggregated the Chicago Fed National Activity Index into its four individual components, and empirically analyzed five separate models using Vector Autoregression (VAR) and Vector Error Correction (VEC) models. The findings provide evidence that lagged values of consumer and business confidence predict current and future total national activity and each of its components, with business confidence exhibiting stronger effects. Furthermore, the orthogonalized impulse response functions show that three out of the five national activity indexes respond instantaneously to shocks in consumer and business confidence.
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Ph. D.