IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Log in (now much improved!) to save this article

Firm Default And Aggregate Fluctuations

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • Tor Jacobson
  • Jesper Lindé
  • Kasper Roszbach

Abstract

This paper studies the relationship between macroeconomic fluctuations and corporate defaults while conditioning on industry affiliation and an extensive set of firm-specific factors. By using a panel data set for virtually all incorporated Swedish businesses over 1990-2009, a period which includes a full-scale banking crisis, we find strong evidence for a substantial and stable impact from aggregate fluctuations on business defaults. A standard logit model with financial ratios augmented with macroeconomic factors can account surprisingly well for the outburst in business defaults during the banking crisis, as well as the subsequent fluctuations in default frequencies. Moreover, the effects of macroeconomic variables differ across industries in an economically intuitive way. Out-of-sample evaluations show that our approach is superior to models that exclude macro information and standard well-fitting time-series models. Our analysis shows that firm-specific factors are useful in ranking firms' relative riskiness, but that macroeconomic factors are necessary to understand fluctuations in the absolute risk level.

(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

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://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/jeea.2013.11.issue-4
Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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.

Article provided by European Economic Association in its journal Journal of the European Economic Association.

Volume (Year): 11 (2013)
Issue (Month): 4 (08)
Pages: 945-972

as
in new window

Handle: RePEc:bla:jeurec:v:11:y:2013:i:4:p:945-972
Contact details of provider: Web page: http://www.eeassoc.org/
Email:


More information through EDIRC

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • C35 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Discrete Regression and Qualitative Choice Models; Discrete Regressors; Proportions
  • C41 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Duration Analysis; Optimal Timing Strategies
  • C52 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Evaluation, Validation, and Selection
  • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
  • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
  • G33 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Bankruptcy; Liquidation

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.:

as
in new window


  1. Mark Gertler & Simon Gilchrist, 1994. "Monetary Policy, Business Cycles, and the Behavior of Small Manufacturing Firms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 109(2), pages 309-340.
  2. 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.
  3. Duffie, Darrell & Saita, Leandro & Wang, Ke, 2007. "Multi-period corporate default prediction with stochastic covariates," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(3), pages 635-665, March.
  4. Platt, Harlan D. & Platt, Marjorie B., 1991. "A note on the use of industry-relative ratios in bankruptcy prediction," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(6), pages 1183-1194, December.
  5. Lown, Cara & Morgan, Donald P., 2006. "The Credit Cycle and the Business Cycle: New Findings Using the Loan Officer Opinion Survey," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 38(6), pages 1575-1597, September.
  6. Gordy, Michael B., 2000. "A comparative anatomy of credit risk models," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 24(1-2), pages 119-149, January.
  7. Carling, Kenneth & Jacobson, Tor & Linde, Jesper & Roszbach, Kasper, 2007. "Corporate credit risk modeling and the macroeconomy," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 845-868, March.
  8. Altman, Edward I, 1971. "Railroad Bankruptcy Propensity," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 26(2), pages 333-345, May.
  9. Pesaran, M. Hashem & Schuermann, Til & Treutler, Bjorn-Jakob & Weiner, Scott M., 2006. "Macroeconomic Dynamics and Credit Risk: A Global Perspective," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 38(5), pages 1211-1261, August.
  10. Ludvigson, Sydney, 1998. "The Channel of Monetary Transmission to Demand: Evidence from the Market for Automobile Credit," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 30(3), pages 365-383, August.
  11. Hackbarth, Dirk & Miao, Jianjun & Morellec, Erwan, 2006. "Capital structure, credit risk, and macroeconomic conditions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(3), pages 519-550, December.
  12. Altman, Edward I. & Saunders, Anthony, 1997. "Credit risk measurement: Developments over the last 20 years," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(11-12), pages 1721-1742, December.
  13. Bernanke, Ben & Gertler, Mark & Gilchrist, Simon, 1996. "The Financial Accelerator and the Flight to Quality," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 78(1), pages 1-15, February.
  14. Sanjiv R. Das & Darrell Duffie & Nikunj Kapadia & Leandro Saita, 2007. "Common Failings: How Corporate Defaults Are Correlated," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 62(1), pages 93-117, 02.
  15. Merton, Robert C, 1974. "On the Pricing of Corporate Debt: The Risk Structure of Interest Rates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 29(2), pages 449-470, May.
  16. Repullo, Rafael & Suarez, Javier, 2000. "Entrepreneurial moral hazard and bank monitoring: A model of the credit channel," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 44(10), pages 1931-1950, December.
  17. Gertler, Mark & Gilchrist, Simon, 1993. " The Role of Credit Market Imperfections in the Monetary Transmission Mechanism: Arguments and Evidence," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 95(1), pages 43-64.
  18. Coe, Patrick J, 2002. "Financial Crisis and the Great Depression: A Regime Switching Approach," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 34(1), pages 76-93, February.
  19. Lando, David & Nielsen, Mads Stenbo, 2010. "Correlation in corporate defaults: Contagion or conditional independence?," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 19(3), pages 355-372, July.
  20. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum & Charles L. Evans, 2005. "Nominal Rigidities and the Dynamic Effects of a Shock to Monetary Policy," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(1), pages 1-45, February.
  21. Christiano, Lawrence J. & Eichenbaum, Martin & Evans, Charles L., 1999. "Monetary policy shocks: What have we learned and to what end?," Handbook of Macroeconomics,in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 2, pages 65-148 Elsevier.
  22. Eric S. Rosengren & Joe Peek, 2000. "Collateral Damage: Effects of the Japanese Bank Crisis on Real Activity in the United States," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(1), pages 30-45, March.
  23. Blume, Marshall E & Keim, Donald B & Patel, Sandeep A, 1991. " Returns and Volatility of Low-Grade Bonds: 1977-1989," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(1), pages 49-74, March.
  24. Altman, Edward I., 1984. "The success of business failure prediction models : An international survey," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 171-198, June.
  25. Laitila, Thomas, 1993. "A pseudo-R2 measure for limited and qualitative dependent variable models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 56(3), pages 341-355, April.
  26. William Poole, 1993. "Credit veils and credit realities," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, issue Spr, pages 83-85.
  27. Samolyk, Katherine A., 1994. "Banking conditions and regional economic performance evidence of a regional credit channel," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 259-278, October.
  28. Diebold, Francis X & Mariano, Roberto S, 2002. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 134-144, January.
  29. Ben S. Bernanke & Mark Gertler, 1995. "Inside the Black Box: The Credit Channel of Monetary Policy Transmission," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(4), pages 27-48, Fall.
  30. Ben Bernanke & Mark Gertler, 1990. "Financial Fragility and Economic Performance," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 105(1), pages 87-114.
  31. Edward I. Altman, 1973. "Predicting Railroad Bankruptcies in America," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 4(1), pages 184-211, Spring.
  32. Tang, Dragon Yongjun & Yan, Hong, 2010. "Market conditions, default risk and credit spreads," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 743-753, April.
  33. Carey, Mark & Hrycay, Mark, 2001. "Parameterizing credit risk models with rating data," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 197-270, January.
  34. Jacobson, Tor & Linde, Jesper & Roszbach, Kasper, 2005. "Exploring interactions between real activity and the financial stance," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 1(3), pages 308-341, April.
  35. Mark Carey, 1998. "Credit Risk in Private Debt Portfolios," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(4), pages 1363-1387, 08.
  36. Edward I. Altman, 1968. "Financial Ratios, Discriminant Analysis And The Prediction Of Corporate Bankruptcy," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 23(4), pages 589-609, 09.
  37. Christoffersen, Peter F, 1998. "Evaluating Interval Forecasts," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(4), pages 841-862, November.
  38. Shumway, Tyler, 2001. "Forecasting Bankruptcy More Accurately: A Simple Hazard Model," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 74(1), pages 101-124, January.
  39. Ayyagari, Meghana & Beck, Thorsten & Demirguc-Kunt, Asl, 2003. "Small and medium enterprises across the globe : a new database," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3127, The World Bank.
  40. Bernanke, Ben & Gertler, Mark, 1989. "Agency Costs, Net Worth, and Business Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(1), pages 14-31, March.
  41. Carling, Kenneth & Rönnegård, Lars & Roszbach, Kasper, 2004. "Is Firm Interdependence within Industries Important for Portfolio Credit Risk?," Working Paper Series 168, Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden).
  42. Manuel Arellano & Stephen Bond, 1991. "Some Tests of Specification for Panel Data: Monte Carlo Evidence and an Application to Employment Equations," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 58(2), pages 277-297.
  43. Altman, Edward I. & Saunders, Anthony, 2001. "An analysis and critique of the BIS proposal on capital adequacy and ratings," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 25-46, January.
  44. Sreedhar T. Bharath & Tyler Shumway, 2008. "Forecasting Default with the Merton Distance to Default Model," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 21(3), pages 1339-1369, May.
  45. McFadden, Daniel, 1974. "The measurement of urban travel demand," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 303-328, November.
  46. Charles W. Calomiris & R. Glenn Hubbard, 1989. "Price Flexibility, Credit Availability, and Economic Fluctuations: Evidence from the United States, 1894–1909," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 104(3), pages 429-452.
  47. Frydman, Halina & Altman, Edward I & Kao, Duen-Li, 1985. " Introducing Recursive Partitioning for Financial Classification: The Case of Financial Distress," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(1), pages 269-291, March.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.

as
in new window


Cited by:
This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.

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

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jeurec:v:11:y:2013:i:4:p:945-972. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing)

or (Christopher F. Baum)

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.

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.