Knowledge that Transforms

We explore the real effects of bank-lending shocks and how they permeate the economy through buyer-supplier linkages. We combine administrative data on all Spanish firms with a matched bank-firm-loan dataset of all corporate loans from 2003 to 2013 to estimate firm-specific credit supply shocks for each year. We compute firm-specific measures of exposure to bank lending shocks of customers (upstream propagation) and suppliers (downstream propagation). Our findings suggest that credit supply shocks have sizable direct and downstream propagation effects on employment, investment, and output, especially during the 2008–2009 crisis, but no significant impact on employment during the expansion. We provide evidence that both trade credit extended by suppliers and price adjustments in general equilibrium explain downstream propagation of credit shocks.

Since the early 1980s, the composition of US public firms has progressively shifted toward less profitable firms with high growth potential (Fama and French, 2004). We estimate a dynamic corporate finance model to quantify the role of this selection mechanism for the secular trend in cash holdings among US public firms. We find that an increase in the precautionary savings motive—primarily driven by the decline in initial profitability among R&D-intensive new lists—explains about 50% of the upward trend in cash holdings. This selection mechanism also explains part of the upward trend in sales growth volatility.

We propose and estimate a quantitative model of exchange rates in which participants in the foreign exchange market are intermediaries subject to value-at-risk (VaR) constraints. Higher volatility translates into tighter VaR constraints, and intermediaries require higher returns to hold foreign assets. Therefore, the foreign currency is expected to appreciate. The model quantitatively resolves the Backus–Smith puzzle, the forward premium puzzle, and the exchange rate volatility puzzle and explains deviations from the covered interest rate parity. Moreover, the model implies both contemporaneous and predictive relations between proxies of leverage constraint tightness and exchange rates. These implications are supported in the data.

We show information spillovers limit the effectiveness of targeted debt relief programs. We study individuals who learn about the likelihood of debt relief from the recent experiences of workplace peers filing for bankruptcy protection. Peers granted bankruptcy can discharge debts, while peers facing dismissal lose all protections. Exploiting the random assignment of judges to bankruptcy cases, we determine that individuals with a “dismissed peer” are significantly less likely to file for bankruptcy or enter foreclosure. We highlight a novel channel relating social networks to household finances and identify additional costs of granting individual debt relief imposed on lenders.

We document several facts about corporate debt maturity: (1) debt maturity is pro-cyclical, (2) higher-beta firms tend to have longer maturity, and (3) shorter maturity amplifies the sensitivity of credit spreads to aggregate shocks. We present a dynamic capital structure model that explains these facts. In the model, leverage and maturity choices are interdependent, which reflect the tradeoffs of liquidity discounts of long-term debt, repayment risks of short-term debt, and the benefit of short-term debt as a commitment device for timely leverage adjustments. Additionally, the model helps quantify the effects of maturity dynamics on the term structure of credit spreads.

The Real-Time Transaction Reporting System (RTRS) reduced the delay in reporting municipal bond trades from one-day to 15 min. We find a significant reduction in secondary market trading costs after the introduction of the RTRS. Our estimates imply that retail investors benefited primarily from reduced dealer intermediation costs, while large trades benefited from reductions in bargaining costs. Bonds experienced increases in trading volume across the liquidity spectrum. We find higher dealer capital commitment, longer intermediation chains, and fewer pre-arranged trades, all suggesting increased market-making incentives for dealers. These results are largely consistent with predictions from search-based models.

Multiple borrowing—when borrower obtains overlapping loans from multiple lenders—is a common phenomenon in many credit markets. We build a tractable, dynamic model of multiple borrowing and show that, because overlapping creditors can impose default externalities on each other, expanding financial access by introducing more lenders can backfire. Capital allocation is distorted away from the most productive uses. Entrepreneurs choose inefficient endeavors with low returns to scale. These problems are exacerbated when investments become more pledgeable or when borrowers have access to more lenders, explaining why increased access to finance does not always improve outcomes.

We exploit the 2011 EBA Capital exercise, a quasi-natural experiment that required a number of banks to increase their regulatory capital. This experiment makes secured lending for the affected banks more attractive vis-à-vis unsecured lending, because secured loans require less regulatory capital. Using loan-level data covering the universe of bank loans in Portugal, we identify how banks require collateral on new loans when facing higher capital requirements: relative to the control group, treated banks require loans to be collateralized more often after the shock. We find the affected banks partially shield their relationship borrowers. The increased collateralization also has economically relevant real effects. Treated banks reallocate funds towards sectors with greater asset tangibility. Firms and sectors borrowing to a greater degree from treated banks exhibit lower growth and tilt their investments towards tangible assets.

The effective bid-ask spread measured relative to the spread midpoint overstates the true effective bid-ask spread in markets with discrete prices and elastic liquidity demand. The average bias is 13%–18% for S&P 500 stocks in general, depending on the estimator used as benchmark, and up to 97% for low-priced stocks. Cross-sectional bias variation across stocks, trading venues, and investor groups can influence research inference. The use of the midpoint also undermines liquidity timing and trading performance evaluations, and can lead non-sophisticated investors to overpay for liquidity. To overcome these problems, the paper proposes new estimators of the effective bid-ask spread.

We investigate whether transaction costs, arbitrage risk, and short-sale impediments explain the abnormal returns of volatility-managed equity portfolios. Even using six cost-mitigation strategies, after transaction costs, volatility management of asset-pricing factors besides the market return generally produces zero abnormal returns and significantly reduces Sharpe ratios. In contrast, abnormal returns of the volatility-managed market portfolio are robust to transaction costs and concentrated in the most easily arbitraged stocks, those with low arbitrage risk and impediments to short selling. Moreover, the managed market strategy only provides superior performance when sentiment is high, consistent with prior theory that sentiment traders underreact to volatility.