Financial frictions and durable goods in DSGE models with sticky prices

Abstract

The focus of this dissertation is to study the role of financial frictions in DSGE models with durable goods and sticky prices, and how key economic variables respond in such an environment to monetary policy shocks. The first chapter studies the empirical evidence regarding the response of durable and non-durable goods to monetary policy shocks. Using quarterly data from Canada and the United States, and a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, we trace out empirically the effects of monetary policy innovations on key macroeconomic variables. We find that in response to an increase in the interest rate, durable consumption, non-durable consumption, output, and household debt decrease, and the nominal interest rate rises. In the second chapter, we show that in the presence of agency costs and equity based borrowing, the two sector sticky price model with collateral frictions resolve the co-movement problem in a way which is consistent with the empirical evidence, even when durable prices are nearly exible. In the third chapter, we examine the effect of financial frictions on the consumption of durables and non-durables in a two-sector DSGE model with sticky prices and heterogeneous agents. The financial frictions are a combination of loan-to-value (LTV) and payment-to-income (PTI) constraints faced by borrowers. In this setting a monetary contraction reduces the maximum amount that consumer that consumers can borrow in order to purchase durable goods. As a result, the model predicts that the consumption of durables falls, along with non-durables even when durable prices are fully flexible. Thus, the model matches better the predictions of the model with the data, relative to the existing literature. The fourth chapter of the dissertation studies the effectiveness of macro-prudential policy measures in curbing house price inflation amid rising outward foreign direct investment from abroad. To assess the usefulness of these macro-prudential policy tools, we use database of housing prices, GDP, bank crises, policy rates, Chinese outward investment and macro-prudential policy measures covering advanced countries at quarterly frequency from 2003 to 2016. The results suggest that Macro prudential policy measures help in reducing house prices and OFDI has a significant and positive correlation with house prices movements.