Three Essays On Macro Finance Banking And Monetary Policy PDF Download

"This dissertation studies the macroeconomic consequences of financial frictions via their roles in determining the capital structures of firms and financial institutions. It consists of two papers in this particular field. The first paper focuses on the capital structure decisions of financial intermediaries and their macroeconomic implications. In this paper, titled "Uncertainty and the Shadow Banking Crisis: A Structural Estimation", I examine the impact of asset return uncertainty on the financing and leverage decisions of shadow banks. Shadow banks play an important role in the modern financial system and are arguably the source of key vulnerabilities leading to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. In this paper, I develop a quantitative framework with endogenous bank default and aggregate uncertainty fluctuation to study the dynamics of shadow banking. I argue that the increase in asset return uncertainty during the crisis results in the spread spike, making it more costly for shadow banks to roll over their debt in the short-term debt market. As a result, these banks are forced to deleverage, leading to a decrease in the credit supply. The model is estimated using a bank-level dataset of shadow banks in the United States. The findings show that uncertainty shocks are able to generate statistics and pathways of leverage, spread, and assets which closely match those observed in the data. Maturity mismatch and asset firesales amplify the impact of the uncertainty shocks. First moment shocks alone can not reproduce the large interbank spread spike, dramatic deleveraging and contraction of the US shadow banking sector during the crisis. The model also allows for policy experiments. I analyze how unconventional monetary policies can help to counter the rise in the interbank spread, thus stabilizing the credit supply. Taking into consideration of bank moral hazard, I find that government bailout might be counterproductive as it might result in more aggressive risk-taking of shadow banks. The contribution of this paper is twofold. On the empirical front, I contribute to the literature by being the first in documenting several stylized facts of the U.S. shadow banking industry using a detailed micro-level dataset. On the theoretical front, I contribute to the literature by being the first in building a quantitative model with heterogeneous banks, endogenous bank default, aggregate uncertainty fluctuation and maturity mismatch to characterize the shadow banking dynamics in a full nonlinear manner and quantifying the impact of uncertainty shocks on the shadow banking industry. In the second paper with Yan Bai and Dan Lu, "Do Financial Frictions Explain Chinese Firms' Saving and Misallocation?", we use Chinese firm-level data to quantify financial frictions in China and ask to what extent they can explain firms' saving and capital misallocation. The literature on the effect of financial frictions on capital outflow and misallocation is large, however, it either uses aggregate data or it ignores firms' financing patterns. Few works use micro-level Chinese data to quantify these frictions. This paper fills this gap. We first document features of the data, in terms of firm dynamics and financing. We find that relatively smaller firms have lower leverage, face higher interest rates and operate with a higher marginal product of capital. We then develop a heterogeneous-firm model with two types of financial frictions, default risk and a fixed cost of issuing loans. We estimate the model using evidence on the firm size distribution and financing patterns and find that financial frictions can explain aggregate firm saving, the co-movement between saving and investment across firms, and around 60 percent of the dispersion in the marginal product of capital (MPK). The endogenous financial frictions, however, generate an opposite MPK-size relationship, which has important implications for total factor productivity losses."--Pages iv-v.