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Working Paper
Interest Rate Surprises: A Tale of Two Shocks
Interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements reveal both the surprise in the monetary policy stance (the pure policy shock) and interest rate movements driven by exogenous information about the economy from the central bank (the information shock). In order to disentangle the effects of these two shocks, we use interest rate changes on days of macroeconomic data releases. On these release dates, there are no pure policy shocks, which allows us to identify the impact of information shocks and thereby distill pure policy shocks from interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements. Our ...
Working Paper
The Transmission of Monetary Policy through Bank Lending : The Floating Rate Channel
We describe and test a mechanism through which outstanding bank loans affect the firm balance sheet channel of monetary policy transmission. Unlike other debt, most bank loans have floating rates mechanically tied to monetary policy rates. Hence, monetary policy-induced changes to floating rates affect the liquidity, balance sheet strength, and investment of financially constrained firms that use bank debt. We show that firms---especially financially constrained firms---with more unhedged bank debt display stronger sensitivity of their stock price, cash holdings, sales, inventory, and fixed ...
Working Paper
Household Inflation Expectations and Consumer Spending: Evidence from Panel Data
Recent research offers mixed results concerning the relationship between inflation expectations and consumption, using qualitative measures of readiness to spend. We revisit this question using survey panel data of actual spending from the U.S. between 2009 and 2012 that also allows us to control for household heterogeneity. We find that durables spending increases with expected inflation only for selected types of households while nondurables spending does not respond to expected inflation. Moreover, spending decreases with expected unemployment. These results imply a limited stimulating ...
Working Paper
On the Distribution of College Dropouts: Wealth and Uninsurable Idiosyncratic Risk
We present a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college degree in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After matriculating and taking some exams, students re-evaluate their expectations about succeeding in college and may decide to drop out and start working. The model shows that, in accordance with the data, poorer students are less likely to graduate and are likely to drop out sooner than wealthier students. Our model generates these results without introducing explicit ...
Working Paper
Self-employment in the global economy
This paper studies the eff ects of foreign competition on self-employment levels. We begin by pointing out a previously unknown fact: the greater the exposure to foreign competition, the smaller the fraction of self-employed people. This fact holds across very different countries, across relatively similar countries like European Union members, and across industries within the United States. We develop a model where heterogeneous agents select themselves into being either employees or self-employed in the spirit of Lucas (1978). This, in turn, translates into intra-industry firm heterogeneity ...
Working Paper
Financial leverage, corporate investment, and stock returns
This paper presents a dynamic model of the firm with risk-free debt contracts, investment irreversibility, and debt restructuring costs. The model fits several stylized facts of corporate finance and asset pricing: First, book leverage is constant across different book-to-market portfolios, whereas market leverage differs significantly. Second, changes in market leverage are mainly caused by changes in stock prices rather than by changes in debt. Third, when the model is calibrated to fit the cross-sectional distribution of book-to-market ratios, it explains the return differences across ...
Working Paper
Is bank debt special for the transmission of monetary policy? Evidence from the stock market
We combine existing balance sheet and stock market data with two new datasets to study whether, how much, and why bank lending to firms matters for the transmission of monetary policy. The first new dataset enables us to quantify the bank dependence of firms precisely, as the ratio of bank debt to total assets. We show that a two standard deviation increase in the bank dependence of a firm makes its stock price about 25 percent more responsive to monetary policy shocks. We explore the channels through which this effect occurs, and find that the stock prices of bank-dependent firms that borrow ...
Working Paper
Not so fast: high-frequency financial data for macroeconomic event studies
Over the last decade, it has become increasingly popular to use event studies with intraday asset pricing data to study the effect of macroeconomic events on the economy. The proponents of this approach argue that asset prices react to macroeconomic events very quickly and that if we know the precise timing of a macroeconomic announcement, a very narrow event window around such an announcement (ranging from 30 minutes to 60 minutes) should be sufficiently long and free from contaminating information that might otherwise cause biased estimates in wider event windows. In contrast, this paper ...
Working Paper
High-Yield Debt Covenants and Their Real Effects
High-yield debt, including leveraged loans, is characterized by incurrence financial covenants, or “cov-lite” provisions. Unlike, traditional, maintenance covenants, incurrence covenants preserve equity control rights but trigger pre-specified restrictions on the borrower’s actions once the covenant threshold is crossed. We show that restricted actions impose significant constraints on investments: Similar to the effects of the shift of control rights to creditors in traditional loans, the drop in investment under incurrence covenants is large and sudden. This evidence suggests a new ...
Working Paper
Monetary shocks and stock returns: identification through the impossible trinity
This paper attempts to identify how monetary policy shocks affect stock prices by using Mundell and Fleming's theory of the "Impossible Trinity." According to this theory, it is impossible to simultaneously have a fixed exchange rate, free capital movement (an absence of capital controls), and an independent monetary policy. The authors present evidence that Hong Kong's monetary policy is heavily dependent on the monetary policy of the United States, a stance which is consistent with this theory because the HK dollar has been pegged to the U.S. dollar since 1983 and Hong Kong does not ...