Browsing by Subject "Information"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Essays in international macroeconomics
    (2013-08) Steinberg, Joseph Bowlin
    This thesis is composed of two separate essays. In the first essay, I study the hypothesis that real exchange rate undervaluation can alleviate the economic symptoms of financial underdevelopment, acting as a temporary substitute for institutional reform. This hypothesis is motivated by recent empirical studies that document a link between real exchange rate undervaluation and increased growth in GDP per capita in developing countries. As further motivation I present new evidence that this effect is driven by an interaction between undervaluation and financial frictions. Using panel data on value added in manufacturing sectors at the 3-digit ISIC level for 103 countries, I find that for countries with low levels of financial development, real exchange rate undervaluation is associated with stronger growth in sectors that depend more heavily on external financing. To establish a causal relationship between undervaluation, financial development and growth and evaluate its quantitative implications I build a multi-sector semi-small open economy model with limited enforcement of financial contracts. Qualitative partial equilibrium results indicate that a government policy of subsidizing the purchase of tradeable goods undervalues the real exchange rate and loosens enforcement constraints, leading to temporary increased growth on the transition to a new steady state with higher output. The magnitude of this effect is increasing in the severity of the enforcement problem. For economies with severe enforcement problems this policy increases consumption although the quantitative effect is quite small. Misallocation of resources can cause large reductions in total factor productivity (TFP). The literature emphasizes financial frictions driven by limited contract enforcement that restrict productive firms' access to credit. Evidence suggests that information frictions also reduce access to credit, particularly in countries with weak contract enforcement. In the second essay, I study how the interaction between information frictions and limited enforcement affects resource allocation and TFP. I build a model in which lenders have imperfect information about borrowers' default risk and enforcing repayment is costly. I use the model to illustrate i) how imperfect information of this type causes misallocation, and ii) how limited enforcement exacerbates this effect. I calibrate the model and find that imperfect information causes TFP to fall by up to 23% when I take contract enforcement parameter values from U.S. data, and by up to 32% when I set them to values common in low-income countries.
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    Essays in macroeconomics and finance.
    (2009-12) Piazza, Roberto
    This thesis proposes two studies that highlight the relevance of financial markets imperfections for aggregate macroeconomic fluctuations and growth. In Part I, I show that financial innovation has increased diversification opportunities and lowered investment costs, but has not reduced the relative cost of active (informed) investment strategies relative to passive (less uninformed) strategies. What are the consequences of this phenomenon? I study an economy with linear production technologies, some more risky than others. Investors can use low quality public information or collect high quality, but costly, private information. Information helps avoiding excessively risky investments. Financial innovation lowers the incentives for private information collection and deteriorates public information: the economy invests more often in excessively risky technologies. This changes the business cycle properties and can reduce welfare by increasing the likelihood of ``liquidation crises". In Part II, I start from the observation that in emerging economies periods of rapid growth and large capital inflows can be followed by sudden stops and financial crises. The chapter, abstracting from business cycles aspects, shows that the process of long run growth can be a key element in accounting for these facts. I study a growth model for a small open economy where decreasing marginal returns to capital appear only after the country has reached a threshold level of development, which is uncertain. Limited enforceability of contracts allows default on international debt. International investors can optimally choose to stop lending when the appearance of decreasing marginal returns slows down the growth of the economy, which then defaults and enters a financial crisis.
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    From focused elements to snippets
    (2013-04) Nagalla, Supraja
    Information Retrieval is a field of computing which traditionally deals with searching a large collection of documents and retrieving documents based on their similarity to the query. INEX [10] provides a platform (e.g., document collection, queries and uniform evaluation metrics) for the development and evaluation of retrieval algorithms for XML documents. The focus of INEX is to reduce the granularity of search results from the entire document to the element level. In 2011, INEX introduced a new track, called the Snippet Retrieval Track. In 2012, INEX improved this track to make the task of assessment easier. Its goal is to determine how best to generate informative snippets for search results. Such snippets should provide sufficient information to allow the user to determine the relevance of each document without viewing the document itself. The Snippet Retrieval track uses the 50.7GB INEX Wikipedia collection of about 2.7 million articles. We use the Smart [15] experimental retrieval system, based on the Vector Space Model [16], for indexing and retrieval. This thesis describes the approaches taken by UMD to generate runs to participate in the INEX 2011 and 2012 Snippet Retrieval track. We use our method of dynamic element retrieval [7] to generate the element vectors of the XML document tree at run time, thus producing a rank-ordered list of elements from each highly correlated document. These elements are further processed using our methods to generate snippets. The methods used, experimental results, and conclusions are described herein.
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    Higher education: power and influence of academic administrative staff members
    (2014-05) Thompson, Denise Renae
    This study examines the role of informal power sources available to administrative staff in university academic departments. The research question that drives the analysis is, "In what ways do administrative staff members utilize informal power to influence departmental decision-making?" Data were collected through interviews with chairs, Directors of Graduate Studies, faculty, and administrative staff at a public research university, utilizing a structured interview guide. Results indicate that staff members in the four departments studied possess and use formal and informal power sources. The formal bases of power studied are formal power and legal prerogative power. The major sources of staff informal power described by the interview participants are productive power (notably, political alliances), information power, and resource power. The study suggests that administrative staff members have access to informal power and those with the skill and willingness to use that power can impact departmental decisions.