This paper reconciles the state of the economy with industry conditions in driving asset liquidation values and, therefore, recovery rates on defaulted debt securities. Evidence to date downplays the economywide effect in favor of industry and debt characteristic explanations. This paper shows that macroeconomic effects are important but operate differentially at the industry level. Industries whose sales growth is more correlated with GDP growth recover less during recessions. And industries that are more dependent on external finance recover less when the stock market falls. These findings expose how economywide shocks are transmitted to industry downturns, providing a framework for the role of aggregate risk in recovery risk and for macroeconomic stress testing.

This paper questions the view that credit rating agencies aggravated the East Asian crisis by excessively downgrading those countries. I find that ratings are, if anything, sticky rather than procyclical. Assigned ratings exceeded predicted ratings before the crisis, mostly matched predicted ratings during the crisis period, and did not increase as much as predictions in the period after the crisis. Ratings are also found to react to non-macroeconomic factors such as lagged spreads and a country’s default history. Therefore it is questionable that ratings exacerbate the boom-bust cycle if they are simply reacting to news, whether macroeconomic or market.

Can banks maintain their advantage as liquidity providers when exposed to a financial crisis? While banks honored credit lines drawn by firms during the 2007 to 2009 crisis, this liquidity provision was only possible because of explicit, large support from the government and government‐sponsored agencies. At the onset of the crisis, aggregate deposit inflows into banks weakened and their loan‐to‐deposit shortfalls widened. These patterns were pronounced at banks with greater undrawn commitments. Such banks sought to attract deposits by offering higher rates, but the resulting private funding was insufficient to cover shortfalls and they reduced new credit.

This paper investigates what induces small firms in an emerging market economy to borrow dollar credit from domestic banks. Our data are from a unique survey of firms in Lebanon. The findings complement studies of large firms with foreign currency loans from foreign lenders. Exporters, naturally hedged against currency risk, are more likely to incur dollar debt. Firms also partly hedge themselves by passing currency risk to customers and suppliers. Less opaque firms with easily verifiable collateral and higher net worth are more likely to access dollar credit. Firms reliant on formal financing (banks and supplier credit) are more likely to contract dollar debt than firms reliant on informal financing (family, friends and moneylenders). Bank relationships, however, do not increase the dollar debt likelihood. And finally, profitable firms are less likely to have dollar debt. Information frictions and limited collateral, therefore, constrain dollar credit even when it is intermediated domestically.

One key risk to the banking system is how funding costs will change as monetary policy is normalized and interest rates rise after almost a decade of near-zero rates. Our contribution is to develop a model that jointly estimates banks’ balance sheets and retail interest rates to arrive at a consistent estimate of the change in bank funding costs as market rates change. Our estimates imply a 100 basis-point shock to the Federal Funds rate would increase overall deposit funding costs by about $40 billion, which is roughly equal to 25% of aggregate annual net income for commercial banks and savings institutions. We also find that deposit rate responses are largely symmetric, in contrast to some previous research showing deposit rates are less responsive to upward movements in reference rates. We introduce unique and confidential data on bank deposit betas to anchor our results.