Collateral Constraint and News-driven Cycles

The boom-bust cycles such as the episode of the "Internet bubble" in the late 1990s may be described as the business cycle driven by changes in expectations or news about the future. The comovements in consumption, labor, and investment, in response to news about productivity changes in the future can be called the news-driven cycles. We show that with the assumption that firms are subject to the collateral constraint in financing input costs, a fairly standard Real Business Cycle model can generate the news-driven cycles. The collateral constraint models have several virtues: (1) The model structure is simple; (2) introduction of the intermediate input enables our models to reproduce procyclical movements in the total factor productivity; (3) our models can generate procyclical movements in price of capital (Tobin's q); and (4) the second model in our paper, which is a modified version of the Carlstrom-Fuerst model, can generate countercyclical movements in bankruptcies, while the original Carlstrom-Fuerst model cannot.