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Working Paper
COVID-19: fiscal implications and financial stability in developing countries
The COVID-19 pandemic is unlike any other crisis that we have experienced in that it hit all economies in the world at the same time, compromising the risk sharing ability of nations. At the onset of the pandemic, the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) jointly pledged 1.16 trillion dollars to help emerging economies deal with COVID-19. Would this amount have been enough to preserve financial stability in a worst case scenario? What were the fiscal implications of the pandemic? In this paper we aim to answer these questions by documenting the size of the fiscal measures ...
Working Paper
Debt Maturity and Commitment on Firm Policies
If firms can issue debt only at discrete dates, debt maturity is an effective device against the commitment problem on debt and investment policies. With shorter maturities, debt dynamics are less persistent and more valuable because upward leverage adjustments are faster and long-run leverage lower. Debt maturities that are relatively shorter than asset maturities increase marginal q, and reduce underinvestment. A decomposition of the credit spread consistent with equilibrium shows that the component due to the commitment problem on future debt issuances is sizeable when leverage and default ...
Discussion Paper
The Changing Landscape of Corporate Credit
Firms’ access to credit is a crucial determinant of their investment, employment, and overall growth decisions. While we usually think of their ability to borrow as determined by aggregate credit conditions, in reality firms have a number of markets where they can borrow, and conditions can vary across those markets. In this post, we investigate how the composition of debt instruments on U.S. firms’ balance sheets has evolved over the last twenty years.
Working Paper
Debt Dynamics with Fixed Issuance Costs
We investigate equilibrium debt dynamics for a firm that cannot commit to a future debt policy and is subject to a fixed restructuring cost. We formally characterize equilibria when the firm is not required to repurchase outstanding debt prior to issuing additional debt. For realistic values of issuance costs and debt maturity, the no-commitment policy generates tax benefits that are similar to those obtained by a benchmark policy with commitment. For positive but arbitrarily small issuance costs, there are maturities for which shareholders extract essentially the entire claim to cash-flows.
Working Paper
Corporate Debt Maturity Matters for Monetary Policy
We provide novel empirical evidence that firms’ investment is more responsive to monetary policy when a higher fraction of their debt matures. In a heterogeneous firm New Keynesian model with financial frictions and endogenous debt maturity, two channels explain this finding: (1.) Firms with more maturing debt have larger roll-over needs and are therefore more exposed to fluctuations in the real interest rate (roll-over risk). (2.) These firms also have higher default risk and therefore react more strongly to changes in the real burden of outstanding nominal debt (debt overhang). ...