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Discussion Paper
What Drives International Bank Credit?
A major question facing policymakers is how to deal with slumps in bank credit. The policy prescriptions are very different depending on whether the decline is a result of global forces, domestic demand, or supply problems in a particular banking system. We present findings from new research that exactly decompose the growth in banks? aggregate foreign credit into these three factors. Using global banking data for the period 2000-16, we uncover some striking patterns in bilateral credit relationships between consolidated banking systems and borrowers in more than 200 countries. The most ...
Working Paper
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Business Expectations
We document and evaluate how businesses are reacting to the COVID-19 crisis through August 2020. First, on net, firms see the shock (thus far) largely as a demand rather than supply shock. A greater share of firms reports significant or severe disruption to sales activity than to supply chains. We compare these measures of disruption to their expected changes in selling prices and find that, even for firms that report supply chain disruption, they expect to lower near-term selling prices on average. We also show that firms are engaging in wage cuts and expect to trim wages further before the ...
Working Paper
Real Rigidities, Firm Dynamics, and Monetary Nonneutrality: The Role of Demand Shocks
We propose a parsimonious framework for real rigidities, in the form of strategic complementarities, that can generate real and nominal dynamics and match key features of the data across several literatures. Existing menu-cost models featuring strategic complementarities require unrealistically volatile shocks to idiosyncratic productivity to be consistent with pricing moments. We develop a simple menu-cost model with strategic complementarities along with idiosyncratic productivity and demand shocks that are disciplined by the data. This approach allows us to overcome previous criticism from ...
Working Paper
Demand Shock, Liquidity Management, and Firm Growth during the Financial Crisis
We examine the transmission of liquidity across the supply chain during the 2007-09 financial crisis, a period of financial market illiquidity, for a sample of unrated public firms with differential demand shocks. We measure differential demand by comparing firms that primarily supply to government customers with those that primarily supply to corporate customers. A difference-in-difference analysis shows little evidence that relatively high demand firms provide more or less liquidity to their own suppliers. The main determinant of the usage of short-term financing is a product market shock. ...
Working Paper
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Business Expectations
We document and evaluate how businesses are reacting to the COVID-19 crisis through August 2020. First, on net, firms see the shock (thus far) largely as a demand rather than supply shock. A greater share of firms reports significant or severe disruption to sales activity than to supply chains. We compare these measures of disruption to their expected changes in selling prices and find that, even for firms that report supply chain disruption, they expect to lower near-term selling prices on average. We also show that firms are engaging in wage cuts and expect to trim wages further before the ...