Debt enforcement,investment, and risk taking across countries

We argue that the prospect of an imperfect enforcement of debt contracts in default reduces shareholder–debtholder conflicts and induces leveraged firms to invest more and take on less risk as they approach financial distress. To test these predictions, we use a large panel of firms in 41 countries with heterogeneous debt enforcement characteristics. Consistent with our model, we find that the relation between debt enforcement and firms’ investment and risk depends on the firm-specific probability of default. A differences-in-differences analysis of firms’ investment and risk taking in response to bankruptcy reforms that make debt more renegotiable confirms the cross-country evidence.     

Financial crises and labor market turbulence

Financial crises in emerging markets trigger a significant reallocation of labor as exchange rate depreciations and interest rate increases cause relative prices to change drastically. Household survey data for Mexico reveal that individuals who switched industry or occupation during the 1994–1995 crisis lost about 10% of their hourly earnings on average compared to similar workers who did not move. This suggests that many workers became less productive in the process of migrating to different economic activities. These productivity losses, in turn, can explain about 40% of the observed fall in TFP in Mexico in 1995.     

Agency Conflicts and Risk Management

This paper analyzes the relation between agency conflicts andrisk management. In contrast to previous contributions, ouranalysis incorporates not only stockholder-debtholder conflictsbut also manager–stockholder conflicts. We show that thecosts of both underinvestment and overinvestment are essentialin determining the firm's hedging policy. In particular, firmsthat derive more of their value from assets in place (lowermarket-to-book ratios), although having lower costs of underinvestment,generally display larger costs of overinvestment. Thus, theymay be more likely to hedge to control these overinvestmentincentives. Our analysis explains why large profitable firmswith fewer growth opportunities tend to hedge more (Bartramet al., 2004). It also provides a number of new predictionsrelating the benefits associated with risk management to variousdimensions of the firm's economic environment.     

Corporate investment and financing under asymmetric information

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions in which corporate insiders have superior information about the firm's growth prospects. We show that firms with positive private information can credibly signal their type to outside investors using the timing of corporate actions and their debt-equity mix. Using this result, we show that asymmetric information induces firms with good prospects to speed up investment, leading to a significant erosion of the option value of waiting to invest. Additionally, we demonstrate that informational asymmetries may not translate into a financing hierarchy or pecking order over securities. Finally, we generate a rich set of testable implications relating firms’ investment and financing strategies, abnormal announcement returns, and external financing costs to a number of managerial, firm, and industry characteristics.     

LIMITED ENFORCEMENT,FINANCIAL INTERMEDIATION,AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: A QUANTITATIVE ASSESSMENT*

We present a model of economic development where the importance of financial differences caused by limited enforcement can be measured. Economies where enforcement is poor direct less capital to the production sector and employ less efficient technologies. Calibrated simulations reveal that the resulting effect on output is large. Furthermore, the model correctly predicts that the average scale of production should rise with the quality of enforcement. Finally, we find that the importance of limited enforcement rises with the importance of capital in production.     

Contract enforcement and the size of the informal economy

This paper describes a model where the size of the informal sector decreases as the degree to which financing contracts can be enforced in the formal sector rises. Agents who choose to operate in the informal sector can evade taxes, but they have no access to official means of contract enforcement. Numerical simulations of the model suggest that lax tax enforcement alone does not suffice to generate a large informal sector. Contractual imperfections, on the other hand, can generate a large informal sector and account for several distinguishing features of the organization of production in developing economies. I would like to thank Tim Kehoe, Ed Prescott and Manuel Santos for their guidance, and seminar participants at ITAM, the Universidad Torcuato di Tella and the University of Montréal for their valuable comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and may not reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.     

The behaviour of producer prices: evidence from French PPI micro data

This paper provides some new empirical findings for how French producers set prices. We used the micro data that composes the producer and business-service price indices from 1994 to 2005. First we address how producer prices are collected. Then we present the main characteristics of how producers change their prices: they are modified infrequently and in small amounts. Also, a behavioural heterogeneity across sectors is observed. Business-service prices change less often than industrial producer prices. The data corroborates both time and state-dependent model predictions. Taylor contracts are not unusual, but a firm’s prices will also react to its economic situation. Nevertheless, the most relevant models, to explain producer price rigidity, are time-dependent.

“The fact that some prices are rigid or sticky, while others are variable, has attracted a good deal of comments from economists in recent years” Tucker (1938)

This study was conducted in the context of the Eurosystem Inflation Persistence Network. Data were processed under the responsibility of INSEE in the context of an agreement between INSEE and the Banque de France (20B-21B-E301/R05019/2005).     

CASH-FLOW TRANCHING AND THE MACROECONOMY

The volume of cash-flow transformation activities has grown markedly over the past few decades. We develop a dynamic model that characterizes the effects of changes in the costs and benefits of security creation. Lower tranching costs and increases in foreign appetite for safe assets can both increase costly security creation with positive effects on GDP and have diverse macroeconomic implications. Whereas the former counterfactually increases yields, the latter lowers them and also raises rents associated with cash-flow transformation. These two features, as well as other subsidiary implications of increased foreign demand, are consistent with recent U.S. data.     

Capital structure,credit risk,and macroeconomic conditions

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the impact of macroeconomic conditions on credit risk and dynamic capital structure choice. We begin by observing that when cash flows depend on current economic conditions, there will be a benefit for firms to adapt their default and financing policies to the position of the economy in the business cycle phase. We then demonstrate that this simple observation has a wide range of empirical implications for corporations. Notably, we show that our model can replicate observed debt levels and the countercyclicality of leverage ratios. We also demonstrate that it can reproduce the observed term structure of credit spreads and generate strictly positive credit spreads for debt contracts with very short maturities. Finally, we characterize the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the pace and size of capital structure changes, and debt capacity.     

Time-varying (S, s) band models: Properties and interpretation

A recent strand of empirical work uses (S, s) models with time-varying stochastic bands to describe infrequent adjustments of prices and other variables. The present paper examines some properties of this model, which encompasses most micro-founded adjustment rules rationalizing infrequent changes. We illustrate that this model is flexible enough to fit data characterized by infrequent adjustment and variable adjustment size. We show that, to the extent that there is variability in the size of adjustments (e.g. if both small and large price changes are observed), (i) a large band parameter is needed to fit the data and (ii) the average band of inaction underlying the model may differ strikingly from the typical observed size of adjustment. The paper thus provides a rationalization for a recurrent empirical result: very large estimated values for the parameters measuring the band of inaction.