Five essays in applied economic theory and times series econometrics with applications to accounting and economics

Abstract

We employ some of the modern tools of economic theory and time series econometrics to consider a number of economic problems. The communication and coordination problems we study are relevant in accounting, business, economics and finance. The thesis begins by examining the behaviour of people and organisations, who are supposed to share a common goal. Then it considers the equilibriating mechanisms of behaviour by groups of economic agents, who usually have conflicting interests. We apply the tools of non-cooperative game theory, which constitutes a large part of modern economic theory. In the sequel, we address the question of why people behave the way they do in their economic a↵airs. Peoples’ economic behaviour is mirrored in the aggregates of macroeconomics. We propose a Time Varying Autoregressive model to study the movements in the five main macroeconomic variables. The methods come from standard Time Series Analysis, but we do introduce some innovative time series techniques. Finally, we conduct an empirical investigation of the movements in one of the five main macroeconomic variables, the rate of inflation. Among the econometric tools employed are standard Autoregressive models (AR), Autoregressive Distributed Lag models (ADL) and the more recent Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) methodology.