The balance sheet adjustment in the household sector was a prominent feature of the Great Recession that is widely believed to have held back the cyclical recovery of the US economy. A key question for the US outlook is therefore whether household deleveraging has ended or whether further...

Does corporate debt overhang affect investment over the medium term? To better uncover this association, I argue that we need to measure debt overhang with a concept of debt accumulation or debt boom, and to combine leverage with liquid assets to capture financial constraints. Using firm-level...

Does corporate debt overhang affect investment over the medium term? To uncover this association, I measure debt overhang with a concept of debt accumulation or debt boom, and combine leverage with liquid assets to capture financial constraints. Using a large US firm-level panel over 1985...

We uncover a new channel-the zombie lending channel-in the transmission of monetary policy to nonfinancial corporates. This channel originates from the presence of unviable and unproductive (zombie) firms. We identify exogenous variation in monetary conditions around the world by exploiting the...