China is now facing the challenges of high leverage. Our study has examined the role of firms’ rising debt in explaining the decrease in labor share in recent years. We developed a model to show that firms may strategically use debt to increase their bargaining power, resulting in lower labor...

We show the competing effects of a housing bubble on the real economy by developing a two-sector dynamic model with housing production. On the one hand, firms can sell or collateralize their houses to obtain financing, so a housing bubble helps firms obtain credit to finance their investment and...