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Working Paper
The Collateral Channel and Bank Credit
We examine the firm-level and aggregate effects of the collateral channel using administrative bank-firm-loan level data. We introduce novel instrumental variables related to the efficiency of federal district bankruptcy courts and show their importance as predictors of collateral use and banks' expected losses given default across collateral types. Our estimates reveal that following increases in real estate values, firms that pledge real estate experience an expansion in bank credit, reductions in credit spreads, and an extension in the maturity of loans that allows for increases in firm ...
Working Paper
Improving Sovereign Debt Restructurings
The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in subsequent decades have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings, and the recent global pandemic crisis has further reignited this discussion. A key question about these policy proposals for debt restructurings that has proved hard to handle is how they influence the behavior of creditors and debtors. We address this challenge by evaluating policy proposals in a quantitative sovereign default model that incorporates two essential features: maturity choice and debt ...
Working Paper
On the cyclicality of the interest rate in emerging economy models: solution methods matter
We study the sovereign default model that has been used to account for the cyclical behavior of interest rates in emerging market economies. This model is often solved using the discrete state space technique with evenly spaced grid points. We show that this method necessitates a large number of grid points to avoid generating spurious interest rate movements. This makes the discrete state technique significantly more inefficient than using Chebyshev polynomials or cubic spline interpolation to approximate the value functions. We show that the inefficiency of the discrete state space ...
Working Paper
Liquidity Shocks, Dollar Funding Costs, and the Bank Lending Channel during the European Sovereign Crisis
This paper documents a new type of cross-border bank lending channel using a novel dataset on the balance sheets of U.S. branches of foreign banks and their syndicated loans. We show that: (1) The U.S. branches of euro-area banks suffered a liquidity shock in the form of reduced access to large time deposits during the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011. The shock was related to their euro-area affiliation rather than to country- or bank-specific characteristics. (2) The affected branches received additional funding from their parent banks, but not enough to offset the lost deposits. (3) ...
Briefing
The Collateral Channel and Bank Credit
We identify the firm-level and aggregate effects of collateral price shocks on business lending and investment — also known as the collateral channel — using detailed bank-firm-loan level data that allow us to observe the pledging of real estate collateral and to control for credit demand and supply conditions. At the firm level, a 1-percentage-point increase in collateral values leads to an increase of 12 basis points in credit growth, whereas the average elasticity of credit to collateral values in the cross-section of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) is seven times larger. Our ...
Working Paper
U.S. Unconventional Monetary Policy and Transmission to Emerging Market Economies
We investigate the effects of U.S. unconventional monetary policies on sovereign yields, foreign exchange rates, and stock prices in emerging market economies (EMEs), and we analyze how these effects depend on country-specifc characteristics. We find that, although EME asset prices, mainly those of sovereign bonds, responded strongly to unconventional monetary policy announcements, these responses were not outsized with respect to a model that takes into account each country's time-varying vulnerability to U.S. interest rates affected by monetary policy shocks.
Working Paper
Credit Supply Shocks During a Non-Financial Recession
We study the drivers and real effects of credit supply shocks during a major non-financial recession, the COVID-19 crisis. Using data on the universe of bank loans in Mexico, we isolate the supply-driven component of credit variations. Credit supply conditions deteriorated in this period, driven by banks' heightened risk aversion. Using matched employer-employee records, we find that negative credit supply shocks reduced firms' employment and increased their exit probability. These effects are larger among financially constrained firms and workers with lower separation costs. In the ...
Briefing
Introducing the Credit Market Sentiment Index
In a forthcoming paper, we develop a new signal-extraction statistical model to estimate a factor summarizing conditions in U.S. credit markets. The factor provides a real-time gauge of "sentiment" in credit markets, above and beyond that attributable to contemporaneous economic conditions. Fluctuations in the credit market sentiment factor are associated with strong asymmetric and nonlinear effects on economic activity, depending not only on the magnitude and sign of a credit market sentiment shock but also on the current economic conditions.
Working Paper
Liquidity shocks, dollar funding costs, and the bank lending channel during the European sovereign crisis
This paper documents a new type of cross-border bank lending channel. The deepening of the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011 restrained the financial intermediation of European banks in the United States. In this period, some of the U.S. branches of European banks faced a dollar liquidity shock?due to their perceived risk reflecting the sovereign risk of their countries of origin?which in turn affected the branches? lending to U.S. entities. We use a novel dataset to analyze the operations of branches of foreign banks in the United States. Our results show that: (1) The U.S. branches of ...