Three Essays in Empirical Macroeconomics and Finance

Abstract

This thesis contains three essays belonging to different strands of empirical macroeconomics and finance literature. The first chapter finds that financial frictions can amplify the impact of uncertainty on real consumption more than the counterparts on real GDP. We explain this finding by stressing the role of durable consumption and the credit channel. The second chapter shows that firms in emerging countries with higher social trust obtain more trade credit and suffer small drops in their profitability under uncertainty compared to firms in emerging countries with lower social trust. The third chapter finds that social connections can reduce the negative impact of monetary contraction shocks on pair-level sales. This impact mainly comes from the trade credit channel.