We examine the impact of uncertainty on employment dynamics. Alternative measures of uncertainty are constructed based on the survey of professional forecasters, and regressionbased forecasting models for GDP growth, inflation, S&P500 stock price index, and fuel prices. Our results indicate that...

The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented slump caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This systemic risk like no other at a time of record-breaking debt levels, especially among nonfinancial firms across the world, could exacerbate corporate vulnerabilities, deepen macro-financial...

This paper studies the evolution of non-financial corporate debt among publicly listed companies in major advanced economies between 2010 and 2017. Since 2010, firms have started to rely more on corporate bond markets and have used part of their debt to increase their holdings of cash. In our...

This paper investigates the role of tax incentives towards debt finance in the buildup of leverage in the nonfinancial corporate (NFC) sector, using a large firm-level dataset. We find that so-called debt bias is a significant driver of leverage, for both small and medium-sized enterprises and...

I document that floating-rate loans from banks (particularly important for bank-dependent firms) drive most variation in firms' exposure to interest rates. I argue that banks lend to firms at floating rates because they themselves have floating-rate liabilities, supporting this with three key...

This short paper reviews recent literature on the use of long-term finance in developing economies (relative to advanced ones) to identify where long-term financing occurs, and what role different financial intermediaries and markets play in extending this type of financing. Although banks are...

Promoting credit services to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) has been a perennial challenge for policy makers globally due to high information costs. Recent fintech developments may be able to mitigate this problem. By leveraging big data or digital footprints on existing platforms,...