Economic variables are known to move asymmetrically over the business cycle: quickly and sharply during crises, but slowly and gradually during recoveries. Not known is the fact that this asymmetry is stronger in countries with less-developed financial systems. This new fact is documented using...

Using an extensive new data set on corporate bond defaults in the U.S. from 1866 to 2010, we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises. During the past 150 years, the U.S. has experienced many severe corporate default crises...

Do bankrupt firms impose negative externalities on their non-bankrupt competitors? We propose and analyze a collateral channel in which a firm's bankruptcy reduces collateral values of other industry participants, thereby increasing the cost of external debt finance industry wide. To identify...

We propose a theory of financial intermediaries operating in markets influenced by investor sentiment. In our model, banks make loans, securitize these loans, trade in them, or hold cash. They can also borrow money, using their security holdings as collateral. We embed such banks in a stylized...

We build a dynamic capital structure model to study the link between firms' systematic risk exposures and their time-varying debt maturity choices, as well as its implications for the term structure of credit spreads. Compared to short-term debt, long-term debt helps reduce rollover risks, but...

The persistence of U.S. unemployment has risen with each of the last three recessions, raising the specter that future U.S. recessions might look more like the Eurosclerosis experience of the 1980s than traditional V-shaped recoveries of the past. In this paper, we revisit possible explanations...

Recent research has shown that industries that locate together in space also move together over the business cycle, and that this correspondence between spatial and temporal comovement is important to aggregate volatility. This paper asks whether this correspondence is due to local common shocks...

Time-inconsistency of no-bailout policies can create incentives for banks to take excessive risks and generate endogenous crises when the government cannot commit. However, at the outbreak of financial problems, usually the government is uncertain about their nature, and hence it may delay...

This paper studies the interaction of government debt and financial markets. Both markets are fragile: excessively responsive to fundamentals and prone to strategic uncertainty. This interaction, termed a ʽdiabolic loopʼ, is driven by government willingness to bail out banks and the resulting...