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Working Paper
The Fed Takes On Corporate Credit Risk: An Analysis of the Efficacy of the SMCCF
This paper evaluates the efficacy of the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility, a program designed to stabilize the U.S. corporate bond market during the COVID-19 pandemic. The program announcements on March 23 and April 9, 2020, significantly reduced investment-grade credit spreads across the maturity spectrum—irrespective of the program’s maturity-eligibility criterion—and ultimately restored the normal upward-sloping term structure of credit spreads. The Federal Reserve’s actual purchases reduced credit spreads of eligible bonds 3 basis points more than those of ineligible ...
The Comovement between Credit Spreads, Corporate Debt and Liquid Assets in Recent Crises
Credit spreads rose sharply during the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. But their movement with corporate debt and liquid assets differed during those two periods.
Working Paper
Optimal Debt Dynamics, Issuance Costs, and Commitment
We investigate optimal capital structure and debt maturity policies in the presence of fixed issuance costs. We identify the global-optimal policy that generates the highest values of equity across all states of nature consistent with limited liability. The optimal policy without commitment provides almost as much tax benefits to debt as does the global-optimal policy and, in the limit of vanishing issuance costs, allows firms to extract 100% of EBIT. This limiting case does not converge to the equilibrium of DeMarzo and He (2019), who report no tax benefits to debt when issuance costs are ...
Working Paper
Firm Financial Conditions and the Transmission of Monetary Policy
We study how the transmission of monetary policy to firms' investment and credit spreads depends on their financial conditions, finding a major role for their excess bond premia (EBPs), the component of credit spreads in excess of default risk. While monetary policy easing shocks compress credit spreads more for firms with higher ex-ante EBPs, it is lower-EBP firms that invest more. We rationalize these findings using a model with financial frictions in which lower-EBP firms have flatter marginal product of capital curves. We also show empirically that the cross-sectional distribution of firm ...
Report
It’s What You Say and What You Buy: A Holistic Evaluation of the Corporate Credit Facilities
We evaluate the impact of the Federal Reserve corporate credit facilities (PMCCF and SMCCF). A third of the positive effect on prices and liquidity occurred on the announcement date. We document immediate pass-through into primary markets, particularly for eligible issuers. Improvements continue as additional information is shared and purchases begin, with the impact of bond purchases larger than the impact of purchases of ETFs. Exploiting cross-sectional evidence, we see the greatest impact on investment grade bonds and in industries less affected by COVID, concluding that the improvement in ...
Working Paper
Fintech Lending: Financial Inclusion, Risk Pricing, and Alternative Information
Fintech has been playing an increasing role in shaping financial and banking landscapes. Banks have been concerned about the uneven playing field because fintech lenders are not subject to the same rigorous oversight. There have also been concerns about the use of alternative data sources by fintech lenders and the impact on financial inclusion. In this paper, we explore the advantages/disadvantages of loans made by a large fintech lender and similar loans that were originated through traditional banking channels. Specifically, we use account-level data from the Lending Club and Y-14M bank ...
Working Paper
What Drives the Cross-Section of Credit Spreads?: A Variance Decomposition Approach
I decompose the cross-sectional variation of the credit spreads for corporate bonds into changing expected returns and changing expectation of credit losses with a model-free method. Using a log-linearized pricing identity and a vector autoregression applied to micro-level data from 1973 to 2011, I find that the expected credit loss component and the excess return component each explains about half of the variance of the credit spreads. Unlike the market-level findings in Gilchrist and Zakrajsek (2012), at the firm level, the expected credit loss is volatile and affects the firms' investment ...
Working Paper
Asymmetric Information, Dynamic Debt Issuance, and the Term Structure of Credit Spreads
We propose a tractable model of a firm?s dynamic debt and equity issuance policies in the presence of asymmetric information. Because ?investment-grade? firms can access debt markets, managers who observe a bad private signal can both conceal this information and shield shareholders from infusing capital into the firm by issuing new debt to service existing debt, thus avoiding default. The implication is that the ?asymmetric information channel? can generate jumps to default (from the creditors? perspective) only for those "high-yield" firms that have exhausted their ability to borrow. ...
Speech
The importance of financial conditions in the conduct of monetary policy: remarks at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, Sarasota, Florida
Remarks at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, Sarasota, Florida.
Working Paper
Decomposing the Monetary Policy Multiplier
Financial markets play an important role in generating monetary policy transmission asymmetries in the US. Credit spreads only adjust to unexpected increases in interest rates, causing output and prices to respond more to a monetary tightening than to an expansion. At a one year horizon, the ‘financial multiplier’ of monetary policy—defined as the ratio between the cumulative responses of employment and credit spreads—is zero for a monetary expansion, -2 for a monetary tightening, and -4 for a monetary tightening that takes place under strained credit market conditions. These results ...