Using data on balance sheets of both financial and nonfinancial sectors of the economy, we use a “demand system” approach to study how lender composition and willingness to provide credit affect the relationship between credit expansions and real activity. A key advantage of jointly modeling the demand for and supply of credit is the ability to evaluate equilibrium elasticities of credit quantities with respect to variables of interest. We document that the sectoral composition of lenders financing a credit expansion is a key determinant for subsequent real activity and crisis probability. We show that banks and nonbanks respond differentially to changes in macroeconomic conditions, with bank credit more sensitive to economic downturns. Our results thus suggest that secular changes in the structure of the financial sector will affect the dynamics of credit boom-bust cycles.

Do global credit conditions affect local credit and business cycles? Using a large cross-section of equity and corporate bond market returns around the world, we construct a novel global credit factor and a global risk factor that jointly price the international equity and bond cross-section. We uncover a global credit cycle in risky asset returns, which is distinct from the global risk cycle. We document that the global credit cycle in asset returns translates into a global credit cycle in credit quantities, with a tightening in global credit conditions

predicting extreme capital flow episodes and declines in the stock of country-level private debt. Furthermore, global credit conditions predict the mean and left tail of real GDP growth outcomes at the country-level. Thus, the global pricing of corporate credit is a fundamental factor in driving local credit conditions and real outcomes.

We study the determinants of active debt management through issuance and refinancing decisions for firms around the world. We leverage instrument-level data to create a comprehensive picture of the maturity, currency, and security type composition of firms' debt for a large cross-section of countries. At the instrument level, we estimate a predictive model of prepayment as a function of interest costs savings and maturity lengthening motives. We document that there is substantial heterogeneity in prepayment across bonds and loans and across firms, depending on their reliance on bank lending. While debt prepayment is generally successful at extending average maturities and lowering interest rate costs at the firm level, these benefits appear smaller for issuers in emerging market economies. Tight global credit conditions reduce both the ability to prepay debt early and the effectiveness of debt refinancing in reducing interest costs and rollover risk. Put together, our results show that the impact of global credit conditions on firms' debt structure can be traced back to how instrument-level prepayment incentives change over the global credit cycle.

We collect comprehensive granular data on various aspects of firms' access to credit markets. We document ten facts that show that inferring credit conditions for new debt from those for existing debt - and vice versa - leads to erroneous conclusions. Secondary market spreads are poor proxies of the cost of new debt. Investment grade issuance is driven by firms’ own secondary market spreads, while high yield issuance responds to macroeconomic conditions. Bond issuances overstate changes in firm indebtedness. Emerging market bond and loan borrowing is complementary for firms with access to both markets, but borrowing of loan-only firms appears disconnected. 

What are the real costs of reversals in international capital flows? In this paper, I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in firms' exposure to rollover risk to identify a causal liquidity channel at play during sudden stop episodes. Using a panel of firms across 39 countries, I show that firms with higher exposure (as measured by the share of long-term debt maturing over the next year) reduce investment ten percentage points more than non-exposed firms following sudden stops in capital flows. The impact is persistent: exposed firms experience lower investment, lower employment and lower assets than non-exposed firms even three years after the initial shock. In robustness tests, I show that the results are specific to sudden stop episodes in that they do not hold in periods without sudden stops, and they hold across sudden stop episodes regardless of whether the sudden stop takes place during large economic contractions.

We re-examine the relationship between monetary policy and financial stability in a setting that allows for nonlinear, time-varying relationships between monetary policy, financial stability, and macroeconomic outcomes. Using novel machine-learning techniques, we estimate a flexible “nonlinear VAR” for the stance of monetary policy, real activity, inflation, and financial conditions, and evaluate counterfactual evolutions of downside risk to real activity under alternative monetary policy paths. We find that a tighter path of monetary policy in 2003-05 would have increased the risk of adverse real outcomes three to four years ahead, especially if the tightening had been large or rapid. This suggests that there is limited evidence to support “leaning against the wind” even once one allows for rich nonlinearities, intertemporal dependence, and crisis predictability.

We derive a long-run risk model with time-varying inflation non-neutrality and show that it matches a challenging set of moments describing the joint dynamics of stock returns, term structure of nominal bond yields and returns, as well as macroeconomic fundamentals. Furthermore, we match not only more moments than other long-run risk models, but also moments that remained unaddressed in the literature so far, i.e., the volatility of the risk-free rate and of the dividend-price ratio, and the dividend-price ratio ability to predict stock market returns, consumption and dividend growth rates. More importantly, we match this challenging set of moments, while simultaneously holding the risk aversion and elasticity of intertemporal substitution parameters low.

I show that plausibly exogenous capital inflows drive boom-bust credit cycles and, more importantly, also drive cyclical changes in issuer credit quality; as credit booms disproportionately affect credit conditions faced by low-quality firms. I also show that deterioration in corporate issuer credit quality is a better predictor of a country's subsequent GDP growth than measures of aggregate corporate credit growth. I uncover a corporate balance sheet channel that helps explain why credit booms predict lower GDP growth. Underperformance of low quality firms that lever-up, especially during credit booms, explains a significant part of the growth decline. Low quality firms reduce capital expenditures and employment disproportionately more than good quality firms during a creditbust. The results are consistent with a global credit cycle that pushes capital into countries/firms irrespective of their own investment opportunities and repayment capacity.

I study the effects of US Macroeconomic surprises on the pricing of sovereign risk of sixty-six countries in the period 2002-2017 using daily CDS data. I also explore how a country spread's sensitivity to these shocks depends on a wide range of country characteristics. I discuss potential transmission mechanisms of sovereign distress to the real economy by studying the cross-sectional response of security prices (corporate CDS spreads and stock returns) to global shocks. I find that positive macroeconomic surprises in the US systematically reduce sovereign spreads consistent with the view that global investors price sovereign risk. However, I find that both the size and the sign of the effect depend on the business cycle in the US. During contractionary periods the positive effect of news is greatly reduced, often erased, and sometimes reversed. I also find evidence of asymmetric and non-linear effects. Moreover, I find that country characteristics such as its credit rating, its debt-to-GDP ratio, and measures of economic integration play a crucial role in determining the country's response to US shocks.