IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jfinec/v142y2021i3p1381-1394.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Firm leverage and employment dynamics

Author

Listed:
  • Giroud, Xavier
  • Mueller, Holger M.

Abstract

We examine the dynamic relation between firm leverage buildups and real economic activity using U.S. establishment-, firm-, and region-level data. We find that buildups in firm leverage are predictably associated with boom-bust growth cycles: employment grows in the short run but declines in the medium run. While firm leverage buildups are correlated with firm-level expansions, they continue to predict negative future employment growth if we control for firm-level expansions. Buildups in firm leverage predict a tightening of future firm-level financing constraints, and they only predict negative future employment growth if the level of firm leverage is sufficiently high, suggesting that the dynamic relation between firm leverage buildups and employment growth operates through a financial fragility channel. Our results have aggregate implications: regions with larger buildups in firm leverage experience stronger regional boom-bust growth cycles, and they perform significantly worse during national recessions.

Suggested Citation

  • Giroud, Xavier & Mueller, Holger M., 2021. "Firm leverage and employment dynamics," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 142(3), pages 1381-1394.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:142:y:2021:i:3:p:1381-1394
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.05.006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X21001884
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.05.006?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Javier Bianchi, 2011. "Overborrowing and Systemic Externalities in the Business Cycle," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(7), pages 3400-3426, December.
    2. Xavier Giroud & Holger M. Mueller, 2017. "Firm Leverage, Consumer Demand, and Employment Losses during the Great Recession," Working Papers 17-01, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    3. Antonio Falato & Nellie Liang, 2016. "Do Creditor Rights Increase Employment Risk? Evidence from Loan Covenants," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 71(6), pages 2545-2590, December.
    4. Atif Mian & Amir Sufi & Emil Verner, 2017. "Household Debt and Business Cycles Worldwide," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 132(4), pages 1755-1817.
    5. 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.
    6. √Íscar Jord√Ä & Moritz Schularick & Alan M. Taylor, 2013. "When Credit Bites Back," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 45(s2), pages 3-28, December.
    7. 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.
    8. Guido Lorenzoni, 2008. "Inefficient Credit Booms," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 75(3), pages 809-833.
    9. Anton Korinek & Alp Simsek, 2016. "Liquidity Trap and Excessive Leverage," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(3), pages 699-738, March.
    10. John R. Graham & Mark T. Leary, 2011. "A Review of Empirical Capital Structure Research and Directions for the Future," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 3(1), pages 309-345, December.
    11. John Geanakoplos & Ana Fostel, 2008. "Leverage Cycles and the Anxious Economy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(4), pages 1211-1244, September.
    12. Pedro Bordalo & Nicola Gennaioli & Andrei Shleifer, 2018. "Diagnostic Expectations and Credit Cycles," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 73(1), pages 199-227, February.
    13. Matthew Baron & Wei Xiong, 2017. "Credit Expansion and Neglected Crash Risk," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 132(2), pages 713-764.
    14. Ulrike Malmendier & Geoffrey Tate, 2015. "Behavioral CEOs: The Role of Managerial Overconfidence," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 29(4), pages 37-60, Fall.
    15. Olivier Jeanne & Anton Korinek, 2010. "Excessive Volatility in Capital Flows: A Pigouvian Taxation Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(2), pages 403-407, May.
    16. Moritz Schularick & Alan M. Taylor, 2012. "Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles, and Financial Crises, 1870-2008," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(2), pages 1029-1061, April.
    17. Murray Z. Frank & Vidhan K. Goyal, 2009. "Capital Structure Decisions: Which Factors Are Reliably Important?," Financial Management, Financial Management Association International, vol. 38(1), pages 1-37, March.
    18. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas & Maurice Obstfeld, 2012. "Stories of the Twentieth Century for the Twenty-First," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(1), pages 226-265, January.
    19. Xavier Giroud & Holger M. Mueller, 2017. "Firm Leverage, Consumer Demand, and Employment Losses During the Great Recession," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 132(1), pages 271-316.
    20. Charles J. Hadlock & Joshua R. Pierce, 2010. "New Evidence on Measuring Financial Constraints: Moving Beyond the KZ Index," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 23(5), pages 1909-1940.
    21. Ron S Jarmin & Javier Miranda, 2002. "The Longitudinal Business Database," Working Papers 02-17, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    22. John Graham & Campbell Harvey, 2002. "HOW DO CFOs MAKE CAPITAL BUDGETING AND CAPITAL STRUCTURE DECISIONS?," Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Morgan Stanley, vol. 15(1), pages 8-23, March.
    23. Greg Nini & David C. Smith & Amir Sufi, 2012. "Creditor Control Rights, Corporate Governance, and Firm Value," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 25(6), pages 1713-1761.
    24. John Geanakoplos, 2009. "The Leverage Cycle," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1715, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    25. Ulrike Malmendier & Geoffrey Tate & Jon Yan, 2011. "Overconfidence and Early‐Life Experiences: The Effect of Managerial Traits on Corporate Financial Policies," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(5), pages 1687-1733, October.
    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.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Görtz, Christoph & Sakellaris, Plutarchos & Tsoukalas, John D., 2023. "Firms’ financing dynamics around lumpy capacity adjustments," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 156(C).
    2. Machokoto, Michael & Bayai, Innocent & Kadzima, Marvelous, 2023. "The nonlinear impact of debt on employment: Does institutional quality matter?," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 57(C).
    3. Lai, Shaojie & Chen, Lihan & Wang, Qing Sophie & Anderson, Hamish D., 2023. "Bank competition and corporate employment: Evidence from the geographic distribution of bank branches in China," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    4. Andrea Fabiani & Martha López & José-Luis Peydró & Paul E. Soto, 2023. "Capital Controls, Corporate Debt and Real Effects: Evidence from Boom and Crisis Times," Borradores de Economia 1244, Banco de la Republica de Colombia.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Xavier Giroud & Holger M. Mueller, 2018. "Firm Leverage and Regional Business Cycles," NBER Working Papers 25325, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Mueller, Holger & Giroud, Xavier, 2018. "Firm Leverage and Regional Business Cycles," CEPR Discussion Papers 13355, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95.
    4. Guerrieri, V. & Uhlig, H., 2016. "Housing and Credit Markets," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1427-1496, Elsevier.
    5. Jeremy C. Stein, 2021. "Can Policy Tame the Credit Cycle?," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 69(1), pages 5-22, March.
    6. Rossi, Stefano & Gulen, Huseyin & Ion, Mihai, 2019. "Credit Cycles, Expectations, and Corporate Investment," CEPR Discussion Papers 13679, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. André K. Anundsen & Karsten Gerdrup & Frank Hansen & Kasper Kragh‐Sørensen, 2016. "Bubbles and Crises: The Role of House Prices and Credit," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(7), pages 1291-1311, November.
    8. Atif Mian & Amir Sufi & Emil Verner, 2017. "Household Debt and Business Cycles Worldwide," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 132(4), pages 1755-1817.
    9. Josh Davis & Alan M. Taylor, 2022. "The Leverage Factor: Credit Cycles and Asset Returns," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(10), pages 7350-7361, October.
    10. Paul, Pascal, 2020. "A macroeconomic model with occasional financial crises," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 112(C).
    11. Yun Jung Kim & Jing Zhang, 2021. "The Relationship Between Debt and Output," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 69(1), pages 230-257, March.
    12. Gersbach, Hans & Rochet, Jean-Charles, 2017. "Capital regulation and credit fluctuations," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 113-124.
    13. Batini, Nicoletta & Melina, Giovanni & Villa, Stefania, 2019. "Fiscal buffers, private debt, and recession: The good, the bad and the ugly," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    14. Pablo Pastory y Camarasa & Martien Lamers, 2023. "Do Actions Follow Words? How bank sentiment predicts credit growth," Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium 23/1073, Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.
    15. David López-Salido & Jeremy C. Stein & Egon Zakrajšek, 2017. "Credit-Market Sentiment and the Business Cycle," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 132(3), pages 1373-1426.
    16. Andrea Fabiani & Martha López & José-Luis Peydró & Paul E. Soto, 2023. "Capital Controls, Corporate Debt and Real Effects: Evidence from Boom and Crisis Times," Borradores de Economia 1244, Banco de la Republica de Colombia.
    17. Zia Abbas & Syed Faizan Iftikhar & Shaista Alam, 2019. "Does bank capital affect the monetary policy transmission mechanism? A case study of Emerging Market Economies (EMEs)," International Journal of Financial Engineering (IJFE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 6(02), pages 1-20, June.
    18. Thomas Drechsel, 2023. "Earnings-Based Borrowing Constraints and Macroeconomic Fluctuations," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 15(2), pages 1-34, April.
    19. Jeanne, Olivier & Korinek, Anton, 2019. "Managing credit booms and busts: A Pigouvian taxation approach," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 2-17.
    20. Antonakakis, Nikolaos & Breitenlechner, Max & Scharler, Johann, 2015. "Business cycle and financial cycle spillovers in the G7 countries," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 154-162.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Firm leverage; Employment; Boom-bust cycles;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:142:y:2021:i:3:p:1381-1394. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505576 .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.