Long-term debt is the main source of firm-financing in the U.S. We show that accounting for debt maturity is crucial for understanding business cycle dynamics. We develop a macroeconomic model with defaultable long-term debt and equity adjustment costs. With long-term debt, firms have an incentive to increase leverage in order to dilute the value of outstanding debt. When equity issuance is costly, this incentive helps firms raise more debt through a debt dilution channel and mitigates the decline in net worth through a balance sheet channel, dampening the decline in investment in response to a negative financial shock. Using firm-level data, we estimate equity issuance costs and incorporate our findings into an estimated medium-scale DSGE model. Accounting for debt maturity and the cost of equity financing implies that credit supply shocks are the primary drivers of business cycle fluctuations.

We provide novel empirical evidence that firms’ investment is more responsive to monetary policy when a higher fraction of their debt matures. In a heterogeneous firm New Keynesian model with financial frictions and endogenous debt maturity, two channels explain this finding: (1.) Firms with more maturing debt have larger roll-over needs and are therefore more exposed to fluctuations in the real interest rate (roll-over risk). (2.) These firms also have higher default risk and therefore react more strongly to changes in the real burden of outstanding nominal debt (debt overhang). Unconventional monetary policy, which operates through long-term interest rates, has larger effects on debt maturity but smaller effects on output and inflation than conventional monetary policy.

Higher price markups are typically associated with larger profits at the expense of labor's share of income. In this Economic Commentary, we challenge this view. The key to our argument is the reallocation of market shares toward labor-intensive firms, a reallocation caused by an increase in the prices of capital goods as a result of higher markups.

Companies face different effective marginal tax rates on their income. This can be detrimental to allocative efficiency unless taxes offset other distortions in the economy. This paper estimates the effect of tax rate heterogeneity on aggregate productivity in distorted economies with multiple frictions. Using firm-level balance-sheet data and estimates of marginal tax rates, we find that tax heterogeneity reduces total factor productivity by about 3 percent. Our findings highlight the positive correlation between marginal tax rates and other distortions to capital and especially labor. This implies that tax rate heterogeneity exacerbates the distortionary effects of other frictions in the economy.

We quantitatively analyze the macroeconomic consequences of border delays in Sub-Saharan Africa. Delays of imported intermediate inputs lower aggregate output because of factor misallocation and due to an inefficiently low number of firms that uses foreign inputs in production. Our model economy features heterogeneous firms that endogenously differ in the degree to which foreign inputs are used. The model is calibrated to micro-level data from Sub-Saharan Africa. Reducing border delays can increase aggregate output by up to 9.4%. The gains are mainly due to a reallocation of economic activity towards more productive firms.

We document a strong empirical connection between corporate taxation and the manufacturing labor share, both in the US and across OECD countries. Our estimates associate 30 percent to 60 percent of the observed decline in labor shares with the fall in corporate taxation. Using an equilibrium model of an industry where firms differ in their capital intensities, we show that lower corporate tax rates reduce the labor share by raising the market share of capital-intensive firms. The tax elasticity of the labor share depends on the joint distribution of labor intensities and value added at the micro level. Given the empirical distribution in the US manufacturing sector, our quantitative analysis suggests that corporate tax cuts explain a significant part of the decline in the manufacturing labor share since the 1950s. The shift away from traditionally large, labor-intensive production units raised the concentration of market shares and reduced the concentration of employment.

Capital reallocation between firms is procyclical and leads to variations in measured aggregate productivity. In this paper, we ask how much of the cyclical variation in measured productivity is the consequence of capital reallocation. We build a heterogeneous‐firm model to study the effects of exogenous shocks to total factor productivity (TFP) and to the costs of reallocation. These shocks cause an endogenous cyclicality of measured aggregate productivity. Only a model driven by exogenous TFP shocks is able to generate both data‐consistent cyclical movements in reallocation and sizeable variations in measured aggregate productivity. We find that capital reallocation does not play a major role in amplifying aggregate productivity variations over the business cycle.

Business credit lags GDP growth by about one year. This contributes to high leverage during recessions and slow deleveraging. We show that a model in which firms use risky long-term debt replicates this slow adjustment of firm debt. In the model, slow-moving debt has important effects for real activity. High levels of firm debt issued during expansions are only gradually reduced during recessions. This generates an adverse feedback loop between high default rates and low investment and thereby amplifies the downturn. Sluggish deleveraging slows down the recovery. (JEL E23, E32, E44, G31, G32)

We introduce long-term debt and a maturity choice into a dynamic model of production, firm financing, and costly default. Long-term debt saves roll-over costs but increases future leverage and default rates because of a commitment problem. The model generates rich distributions of maturity choices, leverage ratios, and credit spreads across firms. It explains why larger and older firms borrow at longer maturities, have higher leverage, and pay lower credit spreads. Firms' maturity choice matters for policy: A financial reform which increases investment and output in a standard model of short-term debt can have the opposite effect in a model with short-term debt and long-term debt.

We introduce risky long-term debt (and a maturity choice) to a dynamic model of firm financing and production. This allows us to study two distortions which are absent from standard models of short-term debt: (1.) Debt dilution distorts firms’ choice of debt which has an indirect effect on investment; (2.) Debt overhang directly distorts investment. In a dynamic model of production, leverage, and debt maturity, we show that the two distortions interact to reduce investment, increase leverage, and increase the default rate. We provide empirical evidence from U.S. firms that is consistent with the model predictions. Debt dilution and debt overhang can overturn standard results: A financial reform which increases investment, employment, output, and welfare in a standard model of short-term debt can have the opposite effect in a model with short-term debt and long-term debt.

We introduce long-term debt (and a maturity choice) into a standard model of firm financing and investment. This allows us to study two distortions of investment: (1.) Debt dilution distorts firms’ choice of debt which has an indirect effect on investment; (2.) Debt overhang directly distorts investment. In a dynamic model of investment, leverage, and debt maturity, we show that the two frictions interact to reduce investment, increase leverage, and increase the default rate. We provide empirical evidence from U.S. firms that is consistent with the model predictions. Using our model, we isolate and quantify the effect of debt dilution and debt overhang. Debt dilution is more important for firm value than debt overhang. Debt overhang can actually increase firm value by reducing debt dilution. The negative effect of debt dilution on investment is about half as strong as that of debt overhang. Eliminating the two distortions leads to an increase in investment equivalent to a reduction in the corporate income tax of 3.5 percentage points.

This paper studies the effects of cyclical capital reallocation on aggregate productivity. Frictions in the reallocation process are a source of factor misallocation and lead to variations in measured aggregate productivity over the business cycle. The effects are quantitatively important in the presence of fluctuations in the cross-sectional dispersion of plant-level productivity shocks. The cyclicality of the productivity losses depends on the joint distribution of capital and plant-level productivity. Even without aggregate productivity shocks, the model has quantitative properties that resemble those of a standard stochastic growth model: (i) persistent variation in the Solow residual, (ii) positive co-movement of output, investment and consumption and (iii) consumption smoothing. The estimated model with dispersion shocks alone accounts for nearly 85\% of the time series variation in the observed Solow residual. Contrary to a model with productivity shocks, the model driven by dispersion shocks can mimic the dynamics of reallocation and the cross sectional dispersion in average capital productivity. Instead of relying on approximative solution techniques we show analytically that a higher-order moment is needed to solve the model accurately.

We introduce risky long-term debt to a standard model of firm financing and investment. This allows us to identify a novel amplification mechanism: the Long-term Debt Accelerator. A negative shock triggers an adverse feedback loop between low investment and high credit spreads. Relative to a frictionless RBC setup, the Long-term Debt Accelerator amplifies shocks by about 160%. This amplification mechanism is absent from standard models including only short-term debt. Negative shocks are more severe than positive shocks of equal size and amplification is stronger for larger shocks. If fundamental volatility is lower and firms accumulate more debt, recessions become more severe. The Long-term Debt Accelerator is in line with the empirically observed cyclical behavior of credit spreads, leverage, and debt maturity.

We study the employment and output effects of the short-time work (STW) policy in Germany between 2009 and 2010.This intervention facilitated reductions in hours worked per employee with the goal of preventing layoffs.Using confidential German micro-level data we estimate a search model with heterogeneous multi-worker firms as a basis for policy analysis.Our findings suggest that STW can prevent increases in unemployment during a recession.However, the policy leads to a decrease in the allocative efficiency of the labor market, resulting in significant output losses.These effects arise from a reduction in the vacancy filling rate resulting from the policy intervention.

We study the employment and productivity effects of short-time work (STW) in Germany between 2009 and 2010. The policy facilitated reductions in hours worked per employee with the goal of preventing layoffs. Using confidential German micro-level data we estimate a search model with heterogeneous multi-worker firms. Our findings suggest that STW was successful in preventing an increase in unemployment. However, the policy has led to a decrease in the allocative efficiency of the German labor market resulting in significant output losses and a large fiscal burden for the government.

Trabajo presentado en el EEA-ESEM: (31 Annual Congress of the European Economic Association & 69th European Meeting of the Econometric Society) celebrado en Genova del 22 al 26 de agosto de 2016

A large part of the existing stock of capital is frequently reallocated between firms. This capital reallocation is procyclical and leads to variations in measured aggregate productivity. In this paper we ask how much of the cyclical variation in measured productivity is the consequence of capital reallocation. We study a heterogeneous-firm model that generates both realistic amounts of capital reallocation, as well as the observed relationship between the intensive and extensive margins of reallocation. We investigate the effects of exogenous shocks to total factor productivity (TFP) and to the costs of reallocation. These shocks induce changes in the amount of capital reallocation and thus cause an endogenous cyclicality of measured aggregate productivity. We find that only a model driven by exogenous TFP shocks is able to generate both data-consistent cyclical movements in reallocation and sizeable variations in measured aggregate productivity.