Is Risk the Fuel of the Business Cycle? Financial Frictions and Oil Market Disturbances
Christoph Schult
IWH Discussion Papers,
No. 4,
2024
Abstract
I estimate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model for the United States that incorporates oil market shocks and risk shocks working through credit market frictions. The findings of this analysis indicate that risk shocks play a crucial role during the Great Recession and the Dot-Com bubble but not during other economic downturns. Credit market frictions do not amplify persistent oil market shocks. This result holds as long as entry and exit rates of entrepreneurs are independent of the business cycle.
Read article
Research Clusters
Three Research Clusters Research Cluster "Economic Dynamics and Stability" Research Questions This cluster focuses on empirical analyses of macroeconomic dynamics and stability.…
See page
Global Banks and Synthetic Funding: The Benefits of Foreign Relatives
Fernando Eguren-Martin, Matias Ossandon Busch, Dennis Reinhardt
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking,
No. 1,
2024
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines the effect of dislocations in foreign currency (FX) swap markets ("CIP deviations") on bank lending. Using data from UK banks we show that when the cost of obtaining swap-based funds in a particular foreign currency increases, banks reduce the supply of cross-border credit in that currency. This effect is increasing in the degree of banks' reliance on swap-based FX funding. Access to foreign relatives matters as banks employ internal capital markets to shield their cross-border FX lending supply from the described channel. Partial substitution occurs from banks outside the UK not affected by changes in synthetic funding costs.
Read article
Comment on "Inflation Strikes Back: The Role of Import Competition and the Labor Market"
Mathias Trabandt
NBER Macroeconomics Annual,
2024
Abstract
Amiti et al. (2024) seek to answer a very topical and important research question: How much did supply-side disruptions and the tight labor market contribute to the recent surge in inflation? The answer provided by the authors is: about 2 percentage points. To arrive at their answer, the authors use a calibrated two-sector New Keynesian model in which they use three correlated shocks in a perfect-storm type setting. The paper also has an interesting empirical part that provides evidence that the channels emphasized in the theoretical model are at work in the data.
Read article
The Importance of Credit Demand for Business Cycle Dynamics
Gregor von Schweinitz
IWH Discussion Papers,
No. 21,
2023
Abstract
This paper contributes to a better understanding of the important role that credit demand plays for credit markets and aggregate macroeconomic developments as both a source and transmitter of economic shocks. I am the first to identify a structural credit demand equation together with credit supply, aggregate supply, demand and monetary policy in a Bayesian structural VAR. The model combines informative priors on structural coefficients and multiple external instruments to achieve identification. In order to improve identification of the credit demand shocks, I construct a new granular instrument from regional mortgage origination.
I find that credit demand is quite elastic with respect to contemporaneous macroeconomic conditions, while credit supply is relatively inelastic. I show that credit supply and demand shocks matter for aggregate fluctuations, albeit at different times: credit demand shocks mostly drove the boom prior to the financial crisis, while credit supply shocks were responsible during and after the crisis itself. In an out-of-sample exercise, I find that the Covid pandemic induced a large expansion of credit demand in 2020Q2, which pushed the US economy towards a sustained recovery and helped to avoid a stagflationary scenario in 2022.
Read article
Three Essays on Cross-Firm Interactions
William McShane
PhD Thesis, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg,
2023
Abstract
Competition in the U.S. appears to have declined. One contributing factor may have been heterogeneity in the availability of credit during the financial crisis. I examine the impact of product market peer credit constraints on long-run competitive outcomes and behavior among non-financial firms. I use measures of lender exposure to the financial crisis to create a plausibly exogenous instrument for product market credit availability. I find that credit constraints of product market peers positively predict growth in sales, market share, profitability, and markups. This is consistent with the notion that firms gained at the expense of their credit constrained peers. The relationship is robust to accounting for other sources of inter-firm spillovers, namely credit access of technology network and supply chain peers. Further, I find evidence of strategic investment, i.e. the idea that firms increase investment in response to peer credit constraints to commit to deter entry mobility. This behavior may explain why temporary heterogeneity in the availability of credit appears to have resulted in a persistent redistribution of output across firms.
Read article
Regulation and Information Costs of Sovereign Distress: Evidence from Corporate Lending Markets
Iftekhar Hasan, Suk-Joong Kim, Panagiotis Politsidis, Eliza Wu
Journal of Corporate Finance,
October
2023
Abstract
We examine the effect of sovereign credit impairments on the pricing of syndicated loans following rating downgrades in the borrowing firms' countries of domicile. We find that the sovereign ceiling policies used by credit rating agencies create a disproportionately adverse impact on the bounded firms' borrowing costs relative to other domestic firms following their sovereign's rating downgrade. Rating-based regulatory frictions partially explain our results. On the supply-side, loans carry a higher spread when granted from low-capital banks, non-bank lenders, and banks with high market power. We further document an operating demand-side channel, contingent on borrowers' size, financial constraints, and global diversification. Our results can be attributed to the relative bargaining power between lenders and borrowers: relationship borrowers and non-bank dependent borrowers with alternative financing sources are much less affected.
Read article
Department Profiles
Research Profiles of the IWH Departments All doctoral students are allocated to one of the four research departments (Financial Markets – Laws, Regulations and Factor Markets –…
See page
Financial Stability
Financial Systems: The Anatomy of the Market Economy How the financial system is constructed, how it works, how to keep it fit and what good a bit of chocolate can do. Dossier In…
See page
Brown Bag Seminar
Brown Bag Seminar Financial Markets Department The seminar series "Brown Bag Seminar" was offered on a regular basis by members of the Financial Markets department and their…
See page