Simon Gilchrist

The Role of Credit Market Imperfections in the Monetary Transmission Mechanism: Arguments and Evidence

Recently, a debate has resurfaced on whether and how credit market imperfections may play a role in the transmission of monetary policy. This new literature attempts to identify the effects of credit market imperfections by analyzing the response to tight money of different forms of credit and different types of borrowers. The arguments and evidence in this literature are reviewed and some new evidence is presented. There is a striking difference in response of credit flows to small versus large borrowers, potentially consistent with the view that credit market imperfections help propagate the impact of monetary policy.

Monetary policy and asset prices

Abstract The first part of this paper surveys the literature on asset prices and monetary policy. We then consider the appropriate policy response to two types of shocks that are associated with how asset prices affect the economy. The first set of shocks are the ones whose primary impact lies in the future. These shocks affect the economy and asset prices through expectations of future growth. The second set are shocks to net worth which directly impact the ability of firms to borrow and for consumers to lend.

Putty-Clay and Investment: a Business Cycle Analysis

This paper develops a general equilibrium model with putty-clay technology, investment irreversibility, and variable capacity utilization. Low short-run capital-labor substitutability induces the putty-clay effect of a tight link between changes in capacity and movements in employment and output. Permanent shocks to technology or factor prices generate a hump-shaped response of hours, persistence in output growth, and positive comovement in the forecastable components of output and hours. Capacity constraints result in asymmetric responses to large shocks with recessions deeper than expansions. Estimation of a two-sector model supports a significant role for putty-clay capital in explaining business cycle and medium-run dynamics.

The Importance of Credit for Macroeconomic Activity: Identification through Heterogeneity

Recent work in macroeconomics emphasizes the role of credit in the transmission mechanism for monetary policy and as a propagation mechanism of business cycle shocks.1 Wlule much evidence has been gathered, not all researchers agree on the relevance of credit for the transmission of monetary policy nor for its relevance as a propagation mechanism of business cycle shocks. For the most part, every one agrees on the facts at hand but differs on their interpretation. In short, the argument is over identification. The primary purpose of this paper is to clarify the identification issues involved; to highlight those identification schemes that are promising avenues for measuring the importance of credit in aggregate fluctuations; and to provide a discussion of both previous evidence and new evidence in light of the identification schemes proposed.

Misallocation and Financial Market Frictions: Some Direct Evidence from the Dispersion in Borrowing Costs

Financial frictions distort the allocation of resources among productive units--all else equal, firms whose financing choices are affected by such frictions face higher borrowing costs than firms with ready access to capital markets. As a result, input choices may differ systematically across firms in ways that are unrelated to their productive efficiency. We propose an accounting framework that allows us to assess empirically the magnitude of the loss in aggregate resources due to such misallocation. To a second-order approximation, the framework requires only information on the dispersion in borrowing costs across firms, which we measure--for a subset of U.S. manufacturing firms--directly from the interest rate spreads on their outstanding publicly-traded debt. Given the observed dispersion in borrowing costs, our approximation method implies a relatively modest loss in efficiency due to resource misallocation--on the order of 1 to 2 percent of measured total factor productivity (TFP). In our framework, the correlation between firm size and borrowing costs has no bearing on TFP losses under the assumption that financial distortions and firm-level efficiency are jointly log-normally distributed. To take into account the effect of covariation between firm size and borrowing costs, we consider a more general framework, which dispenses with the assumption of log-normality and which implies somewhat higher estimates of the resource losses--about 3.5 percent of measured TFP. Counterfactual experiments indicate that dispersion in borrowing costs must be an order of magnitude higher than that observed in the U.S. financial data, in order for misallocation--arising from financial distortions--to account for a significant fraction of measured TFP differentials across countries.

Investment, Capacity, and Uncertainty: A Putty-clay Approach

In this paper, we embed the microeconomic decisions associated with investment under uncertainty, capacity utilization, and machine replacement in a general equilibrium model based on putty-clay technology. We show that the combination of log-normally distributed idiosyncratic productivity uncertainty and Leontief utilization choice yields an aggregate production function that is easily characterized in terms of hazard rates for the standard normal distribution. At low levels of idiosyncratic uncertainty, the short-run elasticity of supply is substantially lower than the elasticity of supply obtained from a fully-flexible Cobb-Douglas alternative. In the presence of irreversible factor proportions, an increase in idiosyncratic uncertainty about the productivity of an investment project typically reduces investment at the micro level, but it raises aggregate investment. Increases in uncertainty also have important dynamic implications, causing sustained increases in investment and hours and a medium-term expansion in the growth rate of labor productivity.

The Macroeconomic Impact of Financial and Uncertainty Shocks

The extraordinary events surrounding the Great Recession have cast a considerable doubt on the traditional sources of macroeconomic instability. In their place, economists have singled out financial and uncertainty shocks as potentially important drivers of economic fluctuations. Empirically distinguishing between these two types of shocks, however, is difficult because increases in economic uncertainty are strongly associated with a widening of credit spreads, an indication of a tightening in financial conditions. This paper uses the penalty function approach within the SVAR framework to examine the interaction between financial conditions and economic uncertainty and to trace out the impact of these two types of shocks on the economy. The results indicate that (1) financial shocks have a significant adverse effect on economic outcomes and that such shocks were an important source of cyclical fluctuations since the mid-1980s; (2) uncertainty shocks, especially those implied by uncertainty proxies that do not rely on financial asset prices, are also an important source of macroeconomic disturbances; and (3) uncertainty shocks have an especially negative economic impact in situations where they elicit a concomitant tightening of financial conditions. Evidence suggests that the Great Recession was likely an acute manifestation of the toxic interaction between uncertainty and financial shocks.

Credit Risk in the Euro Area

We construct credit risk indicators for euro area banks and non-financial corporations. These are the average spreads on the yield of euro area private sector bonds relative to the yield on German federal government securities of matched maturities. The indicators are also constructed at the country level for Germany, France, Italy and Spain. These indicators reveal that the financial crisis of 2008 has dramatically increased the cost of market funding for both banks and non-financial firms. In contrast, the prior recession following the 2000 U.S. dot-com bust led to widening credit spreads of non-financial firms but had no effect on the credit spreads of financial firms. The 2008 financial crisis also led to a systematic divergence in credit spreads for financial firms across national boundaries. This divergence in cross-country credit risk increased further as the European debt crisis has unfolded since 2010. Since that time, credit spreads for both non-financial and financial firms increasingly reflect national rather than euro area financial conditions. Consistent with this view, credit spreads provide substantial predictive content for a variety of real activity and lending measures for the euro area as a whole and for individual countries. VAR analysis implies that disruptions in corporate credit markets lead to sizeable contractions in output, increases in unemployment, and declines in inflation across the euro area.

Transition Dynamics in Vintage Capital Models: Explaining the Postwar Catch-Up of Germany and Japan

We consider a neoclassical interpretation of Germany and Japans rapid postwar growth that relies on a catch-up mechanism through capital accumulation where technology is embodied in new capital goods. Using a putty-clay model of production and investment, we are able to capture many of the key empirical properties of Germany and Japans postwar transitions, including persistently high but declining rates of labor and total-factor productivity growth, a U-shaped response of the capital-output ratio, rising rates of investment and employment, and moderate rates of return to capital.

Investment, capacity, and output: a putty-clay approach

In this paper, we embed the microeconomic decisions associated with investment under uncertainty, capacity utilization, and machine replacement in a general equilibrium model based on putty-clay technology. We show that the combination of log-normally distributed idiosyncratic productivity uncertainty and Leontief utilization choice yields an aggregate production function that is easily characterized in terms of hazard rates for the standard normal distribution. At low levels of idiosyncratic uncertainty, the short-run elasticity of supply is substantially lower than the elasticity of supply obtained from a fully-flexible Cobb-Douglas alternative. In the presence of irreversible factor proportions, an increase in idiosyncratic uncertainty typically reduces investment at the micro level but increases aggregate investment. Finally, we study the relationship between growth and uncertainty on aggregate capacity utilization and rates of machine replacement and investigate the factors that affect the magnitude of replacement echoes.