摘要:
My dissertation studies the impact of banks on macroeconomic outcomes. Chapter 1 explores the effects of bond market growth on the financing decisions of firms, the lending behavior of banks, and the resulting equilibrium allocation of credit and capital. This chapter makes three contributions to understand the impact of bond market liberalization. First, using evidence from reforms in Japan that gave borrowers selective access to bond markets during the 1980s, it shows that firms that obtained access to the bond market used bond issuance to pay back bank debt. More importantly, this large, positive funding shock led banks to increase lending to small and medium enterprises and real estate firms. Second, it proposes a model of financial frictions that is consistent with the empirical findings, and uses the model to derive general conditions under which bond liberalization has this effect on banks. The model predicts that bond liberalization can significantly worsen the quality of the pool of bank borrowers, and so lower bank profitability. These results suggest that Japan's bond market liberalization contributed to both the real estate bubble in the 1980s and bank problems in the 1990s. Third, the model implies that bond markets amplify the effects of shocks to the risk-free rate and firm borrowing, in addition to attenuating the effects of financial shocks. In Chapter 2, I explore how the incentives of domestic banks and sovereign governments interact. I build a model of government default and banks that invest in the debt of their own sovereign. In the model, banks demand safe assets to use as collateral, and default affects bank equity. These losses inhibit banks' ability to attract deposits, leading to lower private credit provision, and lower output. This disincentivizes the sovereign from defaulting. The extent of output losses depends on characteristics of the banking system, including sovereign exposures, equity, and deposits. In turn, bank exposures are aff