The Department of Economics and Business cordially invites you to the Public Defense of the PhD Dissertation
by
Eniko Gabor-Toth
on
Household Heterogeneity, Trade and Macroeconomics
Members of the Defense Committee:
Supervisor: Miklós Koren (CEU)
External member: László Halpern (KRTK KTI)
Internal member: Attila Rátfai (CEU)
Chair: Botond Kőszegi (CEU)
ABSTRACT
In my doctoral thesis I focus on households and the demand side but each chapter studies households in a different context. The first chapter is a joint work with Dimitris Georgarakos and examines empirically household stockholding behavior when these are exposed to news about economic policy uncertainty. We find that households who read more, react more in their stockholding decisions to economic policy uncertainty news. Thus, the paper sheds light on an important new channel, news reading, that affects household stockholding decisions. The second chapter is a joint work with Philip Vermeulen. This chapter shows that assuming constant tastes towards product varieties has non-negligible effects for measuring price changes over time. Using a large disaggregated dataset, we find that, on average, the standard cost-of-living index has an upward bias and quantify the difference between the standard cost of-living index and the taste adjusted cost-of-living index for ten eurozone countries. The third chapter develops a tractable model of trade in used durable goods and shows theoretically that cross-country taste differences between new and used durable goods can generate large fluctuations in international trade flows.