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Working Paper
High-Yield Debt Covenants and Their Real Effects
High-yield debt, including leveraged loans, features incurrence financial covenants or "cov-lite" provisions. These covenants differ from traditional loans' maintenance covenants, as they preserve equity control rights but impose specific restrictions on the borrower after crossing the covenant threshold. Contrary to the prevailing belief that incurrence covenants offer limited protection for creditors, our research reveals a significant and sudden decline in investment upon triggering these covenants. This evidence highlights a novel propagation mechanism for economic shocks, wherein ...
Policy impact of unexpected Fed rate movements blurred by key information cues
Unexpected Federal Reserve monetary policy moves can profoundly affect market participants, investors and the economy. The impact of policy stems not only from its direct effects—the traditional focus for economists—but also from the new information revealed about the Fed’s economic outlook.
Working Paper
Uncertainty, Stock Prices and Debt Structure: Evidence from the U.S.-China Trade War
Using the recent U.S.-China trade war as a laboratory, we show that policy uncertainty shocks have a significant impact on stock prices. This impact is less negative for firms that heavily rely on bank debt whereas non-bank debt does not have a mitigating effect. Moreover, the mitigating effect of bank debt is concentrated among zombie firms. A zombie firm that derives half of its capital from bank debt has no negative stock price reaction to increased uncertainty. These results are consistent with bank debt providing insurance for zombie firms in bad economic times.
Working Paper
Asset Manager Commonality and Portfolio Similarity
Asset managers are increasingly influential in financial markets. We use new regulatory as well as manually collected data on asset managers of life insurers, the largest institutional investors of corporate bonds, and find that insurers with the same asset managers have more similar portfolios and trades. This similarity increases further if the asset manager actively oversees the majority of both insurers’ assets. Moreover, the effect intensifies the longer insurers share the same asset manager. Nevertheless, the effect is primarily driven by purchases rather than sales and the resulting ...
Evolving leveraged loan covenants may pose novel transmission risk
An evolving change affecting the expanding, highly leveraged corporate loan sector may impact how the economy responds to adverse shocks.
Trade liberalization reduces entrepreneurship rate
Our research suggests that if the world becomes increasingly interconnected through international trade, entrepreneurship rates will decrease over time.