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Working Paper
Reorganization or Liquidation: Bankruptcy Choice and Firm Dynamics
In this paper, we ask how bankruptcy law affects the financial decisions of corporations and its implications for firm dynamics. According to current U.S. law, firms have two bankruptcy options: Chapter 7 liquidation and Chapter 11 reorganization. Using Compustat data, we first document capital structure and investment decisions of non-bankrupt, Chapter 11, and Chapter 7 firms. Using those data moments, we then estimate parameters of a general equilibrium firm dynamics model with endogenous entry and exit to include both bankruptcy options. Finally, we evaluate a bankruptcy policy change ...
Working Paper
A Quantitative Theory of the Credit Score
What is the role of credit scores in credit markets? We argue that it is a stand in for a market assessment of a person's unobservable type (which here we take to be patience). We pose a model of persistent hidden types where observable actions shape the public assessment of a person's type via Bayesian updating. We show how dynamic reputation can incentivize repayment without monetary costs of default beyond the administrative cost of filing for bankruptcy. Importantly we show how an economy with credit scores implements the same equilibrium allocation. We estimate the model using both ...
Working Paper
Monetary and financial forces in the Great Depression
What caused the worldwide collapse in output from 1929 to 1933? Why was the recovery from the trough of 1933 so protracted for the U.S.? How costly was the decline in terms of welfare? Was the decline preventable? These are some of the questions that have motivated economists to study the Great Depression. In this paper, the authors review some of the economic literature that attempts to answer these questions.
Working Paper
A Quantitative Theory of the Credit Score
What is the role of credit scores in credit markets? We argue that it is a stand-in for a market assessment of a person’s unobservable type (which here we take to be patience). We pose a model of persistent hidden types where observable actions shape the public assessment of a person’s type via Bayesian updating. We show how dynamic reputation can incentivize repayment without monetary costs of default beyond the administrative cost of filing for bankruptcy. Importantly, we show how an economy with credit scores implements the same equilibrium allocation. We estimate the model using both ...
Working Paper
Money and finance in a model of costly commitment
Working Paper
Capital requirements in a quantitative model of banking industry dynamics
We develop a model of banking industry dynamics to study the quantitative impact of capital requirements on bank risk taking, commercial bank failure, and market structure. We propose a market structure where big, dominant banks interact with small, competitive fringe banks. Banks accumulate securities like Treasury bills and undertake short-term borrowing when there are cash flow shortfalls. A nontrivial size distribution of banks arises out of endogenous entry and exit, as well as banks? buffer stocks of securities. We test the model using business cycle properties and the bank lending ...
Working Paper
Valuation equilibria with transactions costs
Working Paper
On the welfare gains of reducing the likelihood of economic crises
The authors seek to measure the potential benefit of reducing the likelihood of economic crises (defined as Depression-style collapses of economic activity). Based on the observed frequency of Depression-like events, they estimate this likelihood to be approximately one in every 83 years for the U.S. The welfare gain of reducing even this small probability of crisis to zero can range between 1.05 percent and 6.59 percent of annual consumption in perpetuity. These large gains occur because although the probability of entering a Depression-like state is small, once the state is entered it is ...
Working Paper
A welfare comparison of pre- and post-WWII business cycles: some implications for the role of postwar macroeconomic policies
The authors compute the potential economic benefits that would accrue to a typical pre-WWII era U.S. worker from the post-WWII macroeconomic policy regime. The authors assume that workers face undiversifiable income risk but can self-insure by saving in nominal assets. The worker's average utility is computed for two eras: pre-WWII (1875-1941) and post-WWII. In the pre-WWII era, the worker endured business cycles that were large in amplitude and quite volatile, a procyclical aggregate price level with large cyclical amplitude, a high average unemployment rate, and virtually no trend in the ...
Working Paper
Market Concentration in Fintech
This paper discusses concentration in consumer credit markets with a focus on fintech lenders and residential mortgages. We present evidence that shows that concentration among fintech lenders is significantly higher than that for bank lenders and other nonbank lenders. The data also show that the overall concentration in mortgage lending has declined between 2011 and 2019, driven mostly by a reduction in concentration among bank lenders. We present a simple model to show that changes in lender financial technology (interpreted as improvements in quality of loan services) explain more than ...