Credit Market Frictions And The Amplification-Persistence Trade-Off

The issue of how endogenous borrowing constraints lead to the amplification and persistence of aggregate shocks is revisited in this paper. Specifically, I show that an amplification-persistence trade-off is embodied in the setting proposed by Kiyotaki and Moore (1997). The key point is that while complex unit roots associated with persistence of temporary shocks require the fraction of credit-constrained firms to be small enough, large amplification relies on the opposite condition. Incidentally, I confirm the occurrence of periodic and quasi-periodic cycles around the determinate steady state.