Search Results
Working Paper
Financial Development and International Trade
This paper studies the industry-level and aggregate implications of financial development on international trade. I set up a multi-industry general equilibrium model of international trade with input-output linkages and heterogeneous firms subject to financial frictions. Industries differ in capital-intensity, which leads to differences in external finance dependence. The model is parameterized to match key features of firm-level data. Financial development leads to substantial reallocation of international trade shares from labor- to capital-intensive industries, with minor effects at the ...
Working Paper
Financial Development and International Trade
This paper studies the industry-level and aggregate implications of financial development on international trade. I set up a multi-industry general equilibrium model of international trade with input-output linkages and heterogeneous firms subject to financial frictions. Industries differ in capital-intensity, which leads to differences in external finance dependence. The model is parameterized to match key features of firm-level data. Financial development leads to substantial reallocation of international trade shares from labor- to capital-intensive industries, with minor effects at the ...
Working Paper
Labor Market Effects of Credit Constraints: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas—allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes—as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as micro data and the synthetic control approach, we find that easier access to housing credit led to a notably lower labor force participation rate between 1998 and 2007. We show that our findings are remarkably robust to improved synthetic control methods based on insights from machine learning. We explore treatment effect heterogeneity ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy and Home Buying Inequality
Does monetary policy influence who becomes a home owner? Home purchases by low- and moderate-income households may be particularly sensitive to mortgage interest rates, as these households’ budgets are tighter and they more frequently come up against binding payment-to-income ratio constraints in credit decisions. Exploiting the timing of high-frequency observations of mortgage applicants locking in their interest rates around monetary policy shocks, I find that a 1 percentage point policy-induced increase in mortgage rates lowers the presence of low-income households in the population of ...
Working Paper
The Role of Learning for Asset Prices and Business Cycles
I examine the implications of learning-based asset pricing in a model in which firms face credit constraints that depend partly on their market value. Agents learn about stock prices, but have conditionally model-consistent expectations otherwise. The model jointly matches key asset price and business cycle statistics, while the combination of financial frictions and learning produces powerful feedback between asset prices and real activity, adding substantial amplification. The model reproduces many patterns of forecast error predictability in survey data that are inconsistent with rational ...
Working Paper
Rushing into American Dream? House Prices, Timing of Homeownership, and Adjustment of Consumer Credit
In this paper we use a large panel of individuals from Consumer Credit Panel dataset to study the timing of homeownership as a function of credit constraints and expectations of future house price. Our panel data allows us to track individuals over time and we model the transition probability of their first home purchase. We find that in MSAs with highest quartile house price growth, the median individual become homeowners earlier by 5 years in their lifecycle compared to MSAs with lowest quartile house price growth. The result suggests that the effect of expectation dominates the effect of ...
Working Paper
The effects of changes in local-bank health on household consumption
Focusing on localized measures of bank health and economic activity, and renters as well as homeowners, this paper uses an innovative approach to identifying households likely in need of credit to investigate the effect on household spending of a deterioration in local-bank health. The analysis shows that local-bank health tends to impact the expenditures of renters more than homeowners, with the strongest effects for households that likely need credit?those experiencing a negative income shock and having limited liquid wealth. These findings contribute to the discussion of the linkages ...
Working Paper
Intergenerational Linkages in Household Credit
We document economically important correlations between children?s future credit outcomes and their parents? credit risk scores, default, and the extent of credit constraints ? intergenerational linkages in household credit. Using observations on siblings, we find that the linkages are due to unobserved household heterogeneity rather than parental credit conditions directly affecting children?s credit outcomes. In particular, in the sample of siblings, there is no correlation between parental and child credit attributes after controlling for household fixed effects. The linkages are stronger ...
Working Paper
Firm Exit and Liquidity: Evidence from the Great Recession
This paper studies the role of credit constraints in accounting for the dynamics of firm exit during the Great Recession. We present novel firm-level evidence on the role of credit constraints on exit behavior during the Great Recession. Firms in financial distress, with tighter access to credit, are more likely to default than firms with more access to credit. This difference widened substantially in the Great Recession while, in contrast, default rates did not vary much by size, age, or productivity. We identify conditions under which standard models of firms subject to financial frictions ...
Working Paper
Student Loans and Homeownership
We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative dataset for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the student's home state. A $1,000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.5 percentage points for public 4-year college-goers during their mid 20s, equivalent to an average delay of 2.5 months in attaining homeownership. Validity tests suggest that the results are not ...