Advanced Search

Credit market shocks and economic fluctuations: Evidence from corporate bond and stock markets

Contents:

Author Info

  • Gilchrist, Simon
  • Yankov, Vladimir
  • Zakrajsek, Egon

Abstract

To identify disruptions in credit markets, research on the role of asset prices in economic fluctuations has focused on the information content of various corporate credit spreads. We re-examine this evidence using a broad array of credit spreads constructed directly from the secondary bond prices on outstanding senior unsecured debt issued by a large panel of nonfinancial firms. An advantage of our "ground-up" approach is that we are able to construct matched portfolios of equity returns, which allows us to examine the information content of bond spreads that is orthogonal to the information contained in stock prices of the same set of firms, as well as in macroeconomic variables measuring economic activity, inflation, interest rates, and other financial indicators. Our portfolio-based bond spreads contain substantial predictive power for economic activity and outperform--especially at longer horizons--standard default-risk indicators. Much of the predictive power of bond spreads for economic activity is embedded in securities issued by intermediate-risk rather than high-risk firms. According to impulse responses from a structural factor-augmented vector autoregression, unexpected increases in bond spreads cause large and persistent contractions in economic activity. Indeed, shocks emanating from the corporate bond market account for more than 30 percent of the forecast error variance in economic activity at the two- to four-year horizon. Overall, our results imply that credit market shocks have contributed significantly to US economic fluctuations during the 1990-2008 period.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VBW-4W45WP2-1/2/c6c8447c67ae3323dd2468c6bd868d6d
Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Bibliographic Info

Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Journal of Monetary Economics.

Volume (Year): 56 (2009)
Issue (Month): 4 (May)
Pages: 471-493
Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML (with abstract), plain text (with abstract), BibTeX, RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite), ReDIF
Handle: RePEc:eee:moneco:v:56:y:2009:i:4:p:471-493

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505566

For corrections or technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Jeroen Loos).

Related research

Keywords: Corporate bond spreads Financial accelerator Factor models;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Bernanke, Ben S. & Gertler, Mark & Gilchrist, Simon, 1999. "The financial accelerator in a quantitative business cycle framework," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 21, pages 1341-1393 Elsevier.
  2. Domenico Giannone & Lucrezia Reichlin & Luca Sala, 2005. "Monetary Policy in Real Time," Working Papers 284, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
    • Domenico Giannone & Lucrezia Reichlin & Luca Sala, 2005. "Monetary Policy in Real Time," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2004, Volume 19, pages 161-224 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  3. Bernanke, Ben S. & Boivin, Jean, 2003. "Monetary policy in a data-rich environment," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 525-546, April.
  4. James D. Hamilton & Dong Heon Kim, 2000. "A Re-examination of the Predictability of Economic Activity Using the Yield Spread," NBER Working Papers 7954, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  5. Estrella, Arturo & Hardouvelis, Gikas A, 1991. " The Term Structure as a Predictor of Real Economic Activity," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(2), pages 555-76, June.
  6. Mario Forni & Domenico Giannone & Marco Lippi & Lucrezia Reichlin, 2008. "Opening the Black Box: Structural Factor Models with Large Cross-Sections," Working Papers ECARES 2008_036, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
  7. Beaudry, Paul & Portier, Franck, 2003. "Stock Prices, News and Economic Fluctuations," IDEI Working Papers 158, Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse.
  8. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2001. "Forecasting output and inflation: the role of asset prices," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue Mar.
  9. John Y. Campbell & Jens Hilscher & Jan Szilagyi, 2005. "In Searach of Distress Risk," Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers 2081, Harvard - Institute of Economic Research.
  10. Jushan Bai & Serena Ng, 2000. "Determining the Number of Factors in Approximate Factor Models," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 440, Boston College Department of Economics.
  11. Urban Jermann & Vincenzo Quadrini, 2002. "Stock Market Boom and the Productivity Gains of the 1990s," NBER Working Papers 9034, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  12. Ericsson, Jan & Reneby, Joel, 1999. "A Note on Contingent Claims Pricing with Non-Traded Assets," Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 314, Stockholm School of Economics, revised 01 Feb 2002.
  13. John V. Duca, 1999. "What credit market indicators tell us," Economic and Financial Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, issue Q III, pages 2-13.
  14. Bai, Jushan & Ng, Serena, 2007. "Determining the Number of Primitive Shocks in Factor Models," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 25, pages 52-60, January.
  15. Mody, Ashoka & Taylor, Mark P., 2004. "Financial predictors of real activity and the financial accelerator," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 82(2), pages 167-172, February.
  16. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2005. "Implications of Dynamic Factor Models for VAR Analysis," NBER Working Papers 11467, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  17. Marcellino, Massimiliano & Stock, James H & Watson, Mark W, 2005. "A Comparison of Direct and Iterated Multistep AR Methods for Forecasting Macroeconomic Time Series," CEPR Discussion Papers 4976, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  18. Thomas B. King & Andrew T. Levin & Roberto Perli, 2007. "Financial market perceptions of recession risk," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2007-57, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  19. Diebold, Francis X & Mariano, Roberto S, 1995. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 13(3), pages 253-63, July.
  20. Long Chen & Pierre Collin-Dufresne & Robert S. Goldstein, 2009. "On the Relation Between the Credit Spread Puzzle and the Equity Premium Puzzle," Review of Financial Studies, Oxford University Press for Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(9), pages 3367-3409, September.
  21. Lutz Kilian, 1998. "Small-Sample Confidence Intervals For Impulse Response Functions," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 80(2), pages 218-230, May.
  22. Ewing, Bradley T. & Lynch, Gerald J. & Payne, James E., 2003. "The paper-bill spread and real output: what matters more, a change in the paper rate or a change in the bill rate?," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 233-246.
  23. Jermann, Urban J. & Quadrini, Vincenzo, 2007. "Stock market boom and the productivity gains of the 1990s," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(2), pages 413-432, March.
  24. Thomas Philippon, 2006. "The Bond Market's q," NBER Working Papers 12462, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  25. Stock J.H. & Watson M.W., 2002. "Forecasting Using Principal Components From a Large Number of Predictors," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 97, pages 1167-1179, December.
  26. Giorgio Primiceri & Ernst Schaumburg & Andrea Tambalotti, 2006. "Intertemporal disturbances," 2006 Meeting Papers 355, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  27. Hui Chen, 2010. "Macroeconomic Conditions and the Puzzles of Credit Spreads and Capital Structure," NBER Working Papers 16151, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  28. Andrew Ang & Monika Piazzesi & Min Wei, 2003. "What does the yield curve tell us about GDP growth?," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue Mar.
  29. Thoma, Mark A & Gray, Jo Anna, 1998. "Financial Market Variables Do Not Predict Real Activity," Economic Inquiry, Oxford University Press, vol. 36(4), pages 522-39, October.
  30. Michael Dotsey, 1998. "The predictive content of the interest rate term spread for future economic growth," Economic Quarterly, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, issue Sum, pages 31-51.
  31. Fama, Eugene F, 1981. "Stock Returns, Real Activity, Inflation, and Money," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(4), pages 545-65, September.
  32. Pierre Collin-Dufresne, 2001. "The Determinants of Credit Spread Changes," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(6), pages 2177-2207, December.
  33. Gregory R. Duffee, 1998. "The Relation Between Treasury Yields and Corporate Bond Yield Spreads," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(6), pages 2225-2241, December.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
Cited by:
This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:moneco:v:56:y:2009:i:4:p:471-493

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Jeroen Loos).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.