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Working Paper
Trade credit and international trade during the 2008-09 global financial crisis
This paper studies the role of the credit crunch in the severe contraction of trade and economic activity at the height of the 2008-09 global financial crisis, using firm-level data from six emerging market economies in Asia. We construct firm-specific measures of global demand, which allow us to disentangle the effect of falling demand from that of financial constraints on sales. The results indicate that: (1) Although the fall in demand adversely affected the sales of all firms during the crisis, sales declined by less for firms with better pre-crisis financial conditions. (2) In the face ...
Working Paper
Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies
This paper explores the direct effects and spillovers of unconventional monetary and exchange rate policies. We find that official purchases of foreign assets have a large positive effect on a country's current account that diminishes considerably as capital mobility rises. There is an important additional effect through the lagged stock of official assets. Official purchases of domestic assets, or quantitative easing (QE), appear to have no significant effect on a country's current account when capital mobility is high, but there is a modest positive impact when capital mobility is low. The ...
Working Paper
International evidence on government support and risk taking in the banking sector
Government support to banks through the provision of explicit or implicit guarantees affects the willingness of banks to take on risk by reducing market discipline or by increasing charter value. We use an international sample of rated banks and find that government support is associated with more risk taking by banks, especially prior and during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. We also find that restricting banks? range of activities ameliorates the link between government support and bank risk taking. We conclude that strengthening market discipline by reducing bank complexity is needed to ...
Working Paper
Liquidity Shocks, Dollar Funding Costs, and the Bank Lending Channel during the European Sovereign Crisis
This paper documents a new type of cross-border bank lending channel using a novel dataset on the balance sheets of U.S. branches of foreign banks and their syndicated loans. We show that: (1) The U.S. branches of euro-area banks suffered a liquidity shock in the form of reduced access to large time deposits during the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011. The shock was related to their euro-area affiliation rather than to country- or bank-specific characteristics. (2) The affected branches received additional funding from their parent banks, but not enough to offset the lost deposits. (3) ...
Working Paper
Sovereign Default and the Choice of Maturity
This study develops a novel model of endogenous sovereign debt maturity choice that rationalizes various stylized facts about debt maturity and the yield spread curve: first, sovereign debt duration and maturity generally exceed one year, and co-move positively with the business cycle. Second, sovereign yield spread curves are usually non-linear and upward-sloped, and may become non-monotonic and inverted during a period of high credit market stress, such as a default episode. Finally, output volatility, sudden stops, impatience and risk aversion are key determinants of maturity, both in our ...
Working Paper
Sovereign Debt Crises
Sovereign debt crises have been recurrent events over the past two centuries. In recent years, the timing of sovereign crises has coincided or has directly followed banking crises. The link between sovereigns and banks tightened as the contingent liability that the banking sector represents for the sovereign grew, as financial "safety nets" became more common. This chapter analyzes the transmission channels between sovereigns and banks, with a focus on the effect of sovereign distress on bank solvency and financing. It then highlights the notable cost to the real economy of the close ...
Working Paper
Computing business cycles in emerging economy models
We show that computing business cycles in emerging economy models using the discrete state space technique may be misleading. We solve the models of sovereign default presented by Aguiar and Gopinath (2006) using interpolation. We find that the simulated behavior of the spread is quite different from the behavior obtained using discrete state space. In fact, some of the results obtained by Aguiar and Gopinath (2006) using discrete state space are reversed when using interpolation. Our analysis thus provides a new set of benchmark results for quantitative models of sovereign default. ; Updated ...
Working Paper
News, sovereign debt maturity, and default risk
Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous impact on sovereign credit spreads than a comparable shock to labor productivity. A quantitative model of news and sovereign debt default with endogenous maturity choice generates impulse responses and a variance decomposition similar to the empirical VAR estimates. The dynamics of the economy after a ...
Working Paper
Improving Sovereign Debt Restructurings
The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in subsequent decades have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings, and the recent global pandemic crisis has further reignited this discussion. A key question about these policy proposals for debt restructurings that has proved hard to handle is how they influence the behavior of creditors and debtors. We address this challenge by evaluating policy proposals in a quantitative sovereign default model that incorporates two essential features: maturity choice and debt ...
Working Paper
News, sovereign debt maturity, and default risk
Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous impact on sovereign credit spreads than a comparable shock to labor productivity. A quantitative model of news and sovereign debt default with endogenous maturity choice generates impulse responses and a variance decomposition similar to the empirical VAR estimates. The dynamics of the economy after a ...