Investment and the Cost of Capital: New Evidence from the Corporate Bond Market

We study the effect of variation in interest rates on investment spending, employing a large panel data set that links yields on outstanding corporate bonds to the issuer income and balance sheet statements. The bond price data -- based on trades in the secondary market -- enable us to construct a firm-specific measure of the user cost of capital based on the marginal cost of external finance as determined in the market for long-term corporate debt. Our results imply a robust and quantitatively important effect of the user cost of capital on the firm-level investment decisions. According to our estimates, a 1 percentage point increase in the user cost of capital implies a reduction in the investment rate of 50 to 75 basis points and, in the long run, a 1 percent reduction in the stock of capital.

The importance of credit for macroeconomic activity: identification through heterogeneity

Bank loans ; Monetary policy - United States ; Macroeconomics

Do Banking Shocks Matter for the U.S. Economy?

Recent financial turmoil and existing empirical evidence suggest that adverse shocks to the financial intermediary (FI) sector cause substantial economic downturns. The quantitative significance of these shocks to the U.S. business cycle, however, has not received much attention up to now. To determine the importance of these shocks, we estimate a sticky-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with what we describe as chained credit contracts. In this model, credit- constrained FIs intermediate funds from investors to credit-constrained entrepreneurs through two types of credit contract. Using Bayesian estimation, we extract the shocks to the FIs' net worth. The shocks are cyclical, typically negative during a recession, such as the one that began in 2007. Their effects are persistent, lowering economic activity for several quarters after the recessionary trough. According to the variance decomposition, shocks to the FI sector are a main source of the spread variations, explaining 39% of the FIs' borrowing spread and 23% of the entrepreneurial borrowing spread. At the same time, these shocks play an important but not dominant role for investment, accounting for 15% of its variations.Monetary Policy, Financial Accelerators, Financial Intermediaries, Chained Credit Contracts

Banks' financial conditions and the transmission of monetary policy: a FAVAR approach.

We propose a novel approach to assess whether banks' financial conditions, as reflected by bank-level information, matter for the transmission of monetary policy, while reconciling the micro and macro levels of analysis. We include factors summarizing large sets of individual bank balance sheet ratios in a standard factor-augmented vector autoregression model (FAVAR) of the French economy. We first find that factors extracted from banks' liquidity and leverage ratios predict macroeconomic fluctuations. This suggests a potential scope for macroprudential policies aimed at dampening the procyclical effects of adjustments in banks' balance sheets structure. However, we also find that fluctuations in bank ratio factors are largely irrelevant for the transmission of monetary shocks. Thus, there is little point monitoring the information contained in bank balance sheets, above the information already contained in credit aggregates, as far as monetary policy transmission is concerned.Monetary transmission; Credit channel; Factor Augmented Vector Autoregression (FAVAR).

A Simple Dynamic Model of Credit and Aggregate Demand

The purpose of the paper is to present a tractable model of an old topic which is becoming more important in macroeconomics: the link between financial structure and economic activity.Aggregate Demand, Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy, moral hazard, adverse selection, suuply of credit, reserves.

The Credit Spread and U.S. Business Cycles

In this paper, we construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in order to investigate the impact of credit spread shocks on the U.S. business cycle. We find that the shocks to the investment specific technology and the preference weights on consumption and leisure are the main sources of output fluctuation. Shocks to the credit spread and productivity are the main source of the fluctuation in the investment to output ratio. Credit spread shocks also had a significant impact on the output during the recent financial crisis

The mortgage spread as a predictor of real-time economic activity

We analyze the predictive content of the mortgage spread for U.S. economic activity. We find that the spread contains predictive power for real GDP and industrial production. Furthermore, it outperforms the term spread and Gilchrist– Zakrajsek spread in a real-time forecasting exercise. However, the predictive ability of the mortgage spread varies over time