Collateral Constraints, Wage Rigidity, and Jobless Recoveries

The Great Recession has drawn attention to the importance of macro-financial linkages. In this paper I explore the joint role of imperfections in labor and financial markets for the cyclical adjustment of the labor market. I show that jobless recoveries emerge when, upon exiting a recession, firms are faced with deteriorating credit conditions. On the financial side, collateral requirements affect the cost of borrowing for firms. On the employment side, hiring frictions and wage rigidity increase the need for credit, making the binding collateral constraint more relevant. In a general equilibrium business cycle model with search and matching frictions, I illustrate that tightening credit conditions calibrated from data negatively affect employment adjustments during recovery periods. Wage rigidity substantially amplifies this mechanism, generating empirically plausible fluctuations in employment and output.

Financial Reforms and Consumption Smoothing

We study how financial reforms affect the extent of consumption smoothing in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of an emerging economy. Consistent with the empirical literature and reform efforts in South Korea and South Africa, we emphasize the relation between consumer credit and durable purchases, and model reforms as the relaxation of the collateral constraint on lower income households. We find that the relaxation of the collateral constraint accounts for a substantial share of the decline in consumption smoothing experienced in South Korea and South Africa.

Firm Entry and Exit during Recessions

We analyze shocks to productivity, collateral constraint (credit shock), firm operation, and labor disutility in a model of firm dynamics with entry and exit. Shocks to firm operation and labor disutility capture COVID-19 lockdowns. Compared to the productivity shock, the credit and the lockdown shocks generate larger changes in firm entry and exit. The credit shock accounts for lower entry, higher exit, and concentration of exit among young firms during the Great Recession. The lockdown shocks predict a large fall in entry and rise in exit followed by a sharp rebound. In both recessions, changes in entry and exit account for 10-20 percent of the fall in output and hours. Finally, we discuss how the modeling of potential entrants matters for the quantitative results.

Liquidity Traps and Monetary Policy: Managing a Credit Crunch

We study a model with heterogeneous producers that face collateral and cash-in-advance constraints. A tightening of the collateral constraint results in a credit-crunch-generated recession that reproduces some features of the financial crisis that unraveled in 2007 in the United States. We use the model to study the effects, following a credit crunch, of alternative monetary and fiscal policies. (JEL E31, E44, E52, E62, G01, H63)

Do Loan Guarantees Alleviate Credit Rationing and Improve Economic Welfare?

By designing credit contracts with inversely related interest rates and collateral, banks can overcome the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard when there is an informational asymmetry in competitive credit markets. One salient result points out that, if borrowers’ insufficient endowments of wealth cause a binding collateral constraint, a credit rationing equilibrium arises because of collateral’s inability to achieve perfect sorting. The purpose of this paper is to examine the consequences of government loan guarantees on equilibrium credit contracts and economic welfare. More specifically, the effects of loan guarantees on interest rates, collateral, and credit rationing were studied. Our results suggest that government loan guarantees should target high-risk entrepreneurs. Loan guarantees targeting high-risk entrepreneurs reduce a pledge of collateral in credit contracts, drop social cost, and increase economic welfare. Under the circumstances that borrowers’ insufficient wealth causes a binding collateral constraint, loan guarantees targeting high-risk entrepreneurs alleviate the problem of credit rationing and improve economic welfare.

Optimal Macroprudential Policy and Asset Price Bubbles

An asset bubble relaxes collateral constraints and increases borrowing by credit-constrained agents. At the same time, as the bubble deflates when constraints start binding, it amplifies downturns. We show analytically and quantitatively that the macroprudential policy should optimally respond to building asset price bubbles non-monotonically depending on the underlying level of indebtedness. If the level of debt is moderate, policy should accommodate the bubble to reduce the incidence of a binding collateral constraint. If debt is elevated, policy should lean against the bubble more aggressively to mitigate the pecuniary externalities from a deflating bubble when constraints bind.

OPTIMAL GROWTH, DEBT DYNAMICS, AND WELFARE UNDER GDP-BASED COLLATERALS

We analyze the consequences of external debt collaterals on the optimal growth path of a country. We develop a small open economy model of endogenous growth where public spending can be financed by borrowing on imperfect international financial markets, where the country's borrowing capacity is limited. In contrast to the existing literature, which assumes that debt is constrained by the stock of capital, we investigate the consequences of gross domestic product (GDP)-based collaterals. First, we demonstrate that the economy may converge in a finite time, which is determined endogenously, to the regime with binding collaterals. Second, in such regime the steady-state public expenditures-to-GDP ratio is greater than that of the existing literature's models. Finally, we show that the degree of financial openness rises welfare if the collateral constraint is nonbinding and reduces welfare if the constraint binds. The first effect prevails always over the second and total intertemporal welfare increases.