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Working Paper
Credit and Liquidity Policies during Large Crises
We compare firms’ financials during the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19. While the two crises featured similar increases in credit spreads, debt and liquid assets decreased during the GFC but increased during COVID-19. In the cross-section, leverage was the primary determinant of credit spreads and investment during the GFC, but liquidity was more important during COVID-19. We augment a quantitative model of firm capital structure with a motive to hold liquid assets. The GFC resembled a combination of real and financial shocks, while COVID-19 also featured liquidity shocks. We ...
Working Paper
Credit and Liquidity Policies during Large Crises
We compare firms’ financials during the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19. While the two crises featured similar increases in credit spreads, debt and liquid assets decreased during the GFC but increased during COVID-19. In the cross-section, leverage was the primary determinant of credit spreads and investment during the GFC, but liquidity was more important during COVID-19. We augment a quantitative model of firm capital structure with a motive to hold liquid assets. The GFC resembled a combination of productivity and financial shocks, while COVID-19 also featured liquidity ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Credit and Liquidity Policies during Large Crises
We compare firms’ financials during the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19. While the two crises featured similar increases in credit spreads, debt and liquid assets decreased during the GFC but increased during COVID-19. In the cross-section, leverage was the primary determinant of credit spreads and investment during the GFC, but liquidity was more important during COVID-19. We augment a quantitative model of firm capital structure with a motive to hold liquid assets. The GFC resembled a combination of real and financial shocks, while COVID-19 also featured liquidity shocks. We ...
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
Credit and Liquidity Policies during Large Crises
We compare firms’ financials during the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19. While the two crises featured similar increases in credit spreads, debt and liquid assets decreased during the GFC but increased during COVID-19. In the cross-section, leverage was the primary determinant of credit spreads and investment during the GFC, but liquidity was more important during COVID-19. We augment a quantitative model of firm capital structure with a motive to hold liquid assets. The GFC resembled a combination of real and financial shocks, while COVID-19 also featured liquidity shocks. We ...
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 ...
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
Credit and Liquidity Policies during Large Crises
We compare firms’ financials during the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19. While the two crises featured similar increases in credit spreads, debt and liquid assets decreased during the GFC but increased during COVID-19. In the cross-section, leverage was the primary determinant of credit spreads and investment during the GFC, but liquidity was more important during COVID-19. We augment a quantitative model of firm capital structure with a motive to hold liquid assets. The GFC resembled a combination of real and financial shocks, while COVID-19 also featured liquidity shocks. We ...
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 ...