| This dissertation applies dynamic stochastic general equilibrium theory in order to provide contributions to two issues currently debated in international macroeconomics. We think that this approach, by deriving quantitative implications from models built upon economic first principles, might offer interesting insights in a field where theoretical models and empirical applications are often disconnected.; The first manuscript studies what are the essential characteristics required to reproduce countercyclical net exports in optimizing models, when productivity shocks are the primary source of fluctuations. We show that two-country, two-good models a la Backus et al. [1994] deliver countercyclical net exports through large terms of trade effects, whereas in the data we observe important variations in quantities. We argue that the model suffers from excessive smoothness in consumption: domestic spending is systematically less volatile than output. We then consider a class of preferences that embeds home production in a reduced form: consumption volatility increases so that domestic spending is more volatile than output and net exports are countercyclical primarily because of changes in quantities, as in the data. As part of our sensitivity analysis, we show that varying country size, the elasticity of substitution between traded goods or the presence of incomplete asset markets does not affect our findings.; The second manuscript documents deviations in the household's first order condition that equates the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure to the real wage using data from 19 OECD countries over the period 1960-2002. While a large literature has analyzed the properties of this deviation using U.S. data, there is very little international evidence on this deviation. Using standard balanced growth preferences, we find very large and non-stationary deviations in this condition over time in almost all the countries, with particular reference to European countries. We then use time series measures of tax rates to study how much tax rate changes can account for these deviations. After adjusting for taxes, we find that most of these deviations are either eliminated or significantly reduced, suggesting that taxes have played an important role in determining the allocation of time between market and non-market activity. |
