Essays in macroeconomics: Environments with informational and financial frictions

Frictions may crucially influence the behavior of economies and policy design. As a consequence, using macroeconomic models that explicitly incorporate different types of frictions has become popular. In this dissertation, we move in that direction by incorporating either informational or financial frictions into different environments and analyzing their main implications. In the context of informational frictions, we focus on repeated moral hazard problems emerging from the non observability of agents' actions. With respect to financial frictions, we focus on agents' limited access to capital markets.;In the first chapter, we study how the presence of moral hazard in labor contracts shapes the wage distribution in a search environment with on-the job offers. Since moral hazard induces residual wage dispersion as a mechanism to encourage workers' effort (incentives effect), one would intuitively argue that it unambiguously leads to more wage inequality. However, this reasoning overlooks the fact that the presence of moral hazard affects the worker's continuation values resulting from job offers, as well as the effort schedule. These changes are such that the wage profile associated with job offers shifts down and becomes flatter across productivity levels and educational levels which leads to less wage dispersion (wage offers effect). We calibrate the model to the U.S economy. The main result is that the wage offers effect more than offsets the incentives effect. In fact, eliminating the information friction increases wage dispersion by approximately 7%.;In the second chapter, we consider the problem of unemployment insurance in a repeated moral hazard framework. Unlike the existing literature, in our environment, unemployed workers can secretly participate in a hidden labor market. This extension substantially modifies the properties of the optimal payment schedule. In particular, for workers with relatively low continuation values, the payment profile becomes flatter in order to keep them out of the hidden labor market. However, for sufficiently large unemployment spells, payments suddenly drop to zero and participation in the hidden labor market jumps. Altogether, the optimal unemployment insurance system in an economy with a hidden labor market is simple, it has a relatively flat phase and prescribes no payments for long term unemployed workers. These features resemble those present in the unemployment insurance programs of many countries.;In the third chapter, we explore to what extent firms' indirect access to international funds shapes the business cycle of a small open economy. In particular, we model a firm dynamics environment in which firms can only obtain funds through a domestic intermediary and sovereign default is costly. In our environment, each firm's interest rate depends on the whole structure of the corporate sector, and not exclusively on idiosyncratic factors as standard models of firm dynamics suggest. This interdependency introduces spill over effects among firms that work as an amplification/propagation mechanism, reinforcing the negative correlation between the sovereign interest rate and output, and increasing the interest rate volatility and persistence. We also find that the impact of these spill over effects on aggregate output is partially offset by precautionary capital, formation of mature firms.