Essays in macroeconomics

Abstract

The first chapter uncovers a key interaction between government spending, demographics and productivity. I document that age is a key driver of consumption adjustment to government spending shocks, with significantly larger responses among young people, regardless of financial constraints. Further evidence reveals that productivity, wages and hours worked increase relatively more among young workers. I rationalize these findings with a life-cycle model where I introduce learning-bydoing. Young workers accumulate skills on-the-job at a fast rate, while the productivity of the prime-age remains stable. Then, by raising hours worked, a fiscal expansion can generate higher wage increases for young individuals, thus stimulating their consumption. The second chapter analyzes the heterogeneous effects of government spending shocks from a gender perspective. Men typically bear the brunt of recessions due to stronger cyclicality of their employment and wages relative to women's. We study the extent to which fiscal policy may offset or worsen these asymmetric effects across genders. We find that men are hurt or benefit less than women from increases in major government spending components. This result is largely driven by negative spillovers for men working in the private sector. Furthermore, fiscal expansions cannot reconcile both policy goals: offsetting inequitable business cycle effects and closing gender gaps. The third chapter uncovers the crucial role of the horizon in shaping the macroeconomic effects of news shocks, using a novel dataset on worldwide giant mineral discoveries. The median delay between the discovery of a mineral and its exploitation is about twice the delay reported for other commodity-discovery data considered in the literature so far, which allows to study longer-run news events. We find that macroeconomic responses to long-run discoveries are delayed. A news effect appears only two or three years before production starts, underlining an existing, but myopic, e ect of these discoveries on macroeconomic expectations.