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Zombies at Large? Corporate Debt Overhang and the Macroeconomy
With business leverage at record levels, the effects of corporate debt overhang on growth and investment have become a prominent concern. In this paper, we study the effects of corporate debt overhang based on long-run cross-country data covering the near-universe of modern business cycles. We show that business credit booms typically do not leave a lasting imprint on the macroeconomy. Quantile local projections indicate that business credit booms do not affect the economy’s tail risks either. Yet in line with theory, we find that the economic costs of corporate debt booms rise when ...
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 ...
Working Paper
A Local Projections Approach to Difference-in-Differences Event Studies
Many of the challenges in the estimation of dynamic heterogeneous treatment effects can be resolved with local projection (LP) estimators of the sort used in applied macroeconometrics. This approach provides a convenient alternative to the more complicated solutions proposed in the recent literature on Difference in-Differences (DiD). The key is to combine LPs with a flexible ‘clean control’ condition to define appropriate sets of treated and control units. Our proposed LP-DiD estimator is clear, simple, easy and fast to compute, and it is transparent and flexible in its handling of ...
Working Paper
Local Projections
A central question in applied research is to estimate the effect of an exogenous intervention or shock on an outcome. The intervention can affect the outcome and controls on impact and over time. Moreover, there can be subsequent feedback between outcomes, controls and the intervention. Many of these interactions can be untangled using local projections. This method’s simplicity makes it a convenient and versatile tool in the empiricist’s kit, one that is generalizable to complex settings. This article reviews the state-of-the art for the practitioner, discusses best practices and ...
Working Paper
Assessing Macroeconomic Tail Risk
What drives macroeconomic tail risk? To answer this question, we borrow a definition of macroeconomic risk from Adrian et al. (2019) by studying (left-tail) percentiles of the forecast distribution of GDP growth. We use local projections (Jord, 2005) to assess how this measure of risk moves in response to economic shocks to the level of technology, monetary policy, and financial conditions. Furthermore, by studying various percentiles jointly, we study how the overall economic outlook?as characterized by the entire forecast distribution of GDP growth?shifts in response to shocks. We find that ...
Report
Micro Responses to Macro Shocks
We study panel data regression models when the shocks of interest are aggregate and possibly small relative to idiosyncratic noise. This speaks to a large empirical literature that targets impulse responses via panel local projections. We show how to interpret the estimated coefficients when units have heterogeneous responses and how to obtain valid standard errors and confidence intervals. A simple recipe leads to robust inference: including lags as controls and then clustering at the time level. This strategy is valid under general error dynamics and uniformly over the degree of ...
Working Paper
State-Dependent Local Projections: Understanding Impulse Response Heterogeneity
An impulse response is the dynamic average effect of an intervention across horizons. We use the well-known Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to explore a response’s heterogeneity over time and over states of the economy. This can be implemented with a simple extension to the usual local projection specification that nevertheless keeps the model linear in parameters. Using our new decomposition-based approach, we show how to unpack heterogeneity in the fiscal multiplier, an object that at any point in time may depend on a number of potentially correlated factors, including existing ...
Working Paper
Inference for Local Projections
Inference for impulse responses estimated with local projections presents interesting challenges and opportunities. Analysts typically want to assess the precision of individual estimates, explore the dynamic evolution of the response over particular regions, and generally determine whether the impulse generates a response that is any different from the null of no effect. Each of these goals requires a different approach to inference. In this article, we provide an overview of results that have appeared in the literature in the past 20 years along with some new procedures that we introduce ...
Working Paper
State-Dependent Local Projections
Do state-dependent local projections asymptotically recover the population responses of macroeconomic aggregates to structural shocks? The answer to this question depends on how the state of the economy is determined and on the magnitude of the shocks. When the state is exogenous, the local projection estimator recovers the population response regardless of the shock size. When the state depends on macroeconomic shocks, as is common in empirical work, local projections only recover the conditional response to an infinitesimal shock, but not the responses to larger shocks of interest in many ...
Working Paper
Local Projections Bootstrap Inference
Bootstrap procedures for local projections typically rely on assuming that the data generating process (DGP) is a finite order vector autoregression (VAR), often taken to be that implied by the local projection at horizon 1. Although convenient, it is well documented that a VAR can be a poor approximation to impulse dynamics at horizons beyond its lag length. In this paper we assume instead that the precise form of the parametric model generating the data is not known. If one is willing to assume that the DGP is perhaps an infinite order process, a larger class of models can be accommodated ...