Abstract

This thesis studies business cycles driven by agents' expectation of future technology changes. The first chapter explores the effects which nominal rigidities and monetary policies have on the generation of Pigou cycles. The optimal response of the central bank is analyzed under circumstances when agents receive a signal indicating the technology change in the future. To achieve these objectives, I introduce nominal rigidities and monetary policy into a standard two-sector model with non-durable and durable goods. The optimal reaction of the central bank is found by solving the Ramsey optimization problem. I find that nominal rigidities tend to amplify the responses to the expectation and monetary policies affect the expectation driven business cycles by affecting the real interest rate and user cost of durable goods. Another interesting result is that a simple policy rule reacting to the inflation rates in both non-durable and durable sector with appropriate weights can closely mimic the performance of the Ramsey policy. The second chapter estimates a sticky price two-sector model with home production and capital adjustment costs to assess the significance of the news shocks in generating aggregate fluctuations. The analysis suggests that news shocks account for about 34% of the fluctuations in the aggregate output, 25% of the fluctuations in consumption-sector output and 38% of the fluctuations in investment-sector output. The third chapter explores the booms and busts induced by news shocks in a model economy with financial market frictions. With the presence of financial market frictions, firms have to pay an external finance premium which depends inversely on their net values. This provides firms with an incentive to build up capital stocks now to lower the external finance premium in the future. When firms receive news indicating a future technology improvement, they anticipate the need for more capital and so more external finance in the future; they could lower their future external finance costs by building up their capital and net values now. By adding financial market frictions into an otherwise standard RBC model, the model in chapter 3 succeeds in generating a boom when a news shock hits the economy