Download or read book Essays on Heterogeneity and Macroeconomics written by Ömer Tuğrul Açıkgöz and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first chapter of this dissertation is based on the observation that during the past 50 years, the US economy has been characterized by a rapid decline of labor unions and a substantial rise in wage inequality. The chapter proposes that the rise in the skill premium in the non-union sector, for instance, due to technical change, can potentially explain these trends. Based on the premise that labor unions compress wages between skilled and unskilled workers, a larger skill premium encourages skilled workers to withdraw from the union. If this is accompanied by a fall in the productivity of unskilled workers, firms become more reluctant to hire the relatively expensive union workers, reinforcing the decline in the unionization rate. To evaluate this hypothesis, we develop a macroeconomic model of endogenous union membership with heterogenous agents, where union members are selected from the middle of the skill distribution and have significant wage gains that are decreasing in skill, consistent with US evidence. The model predicts that the rise in skill prices in the non-union sector explains 30-60% of the decline in the unionization rate. It was argued that the declining union activity contributed to the rise in wage inequality by changing the labor force composition. We find this effect to be much smaller due to selection into union jobs. In the second chapter, I investigate the role of heterogeneity and misaggregation in explaning the empirically missing correlations between the relative consumption and real exchange rates between countries, referred to as the Backus-Smith puzzle. I construct a two-country general-equilibrium model with heterogeneous households that choose to consume either an imported good, or its domestic variant. I show that upon aggregation, the corresponding 'representative agent'' acts as if he is subject to taste shocks, which works towards weakening the tight link between relative prices and quantities. The model therefore constitutes a microfoundation for what shows up as taste shocks in the data. I argue that the missing correlations could be an artifact of heterogeneity"--Page v-vi.