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We use a quasi-experimental research design to examine the effect of model-based capital regulation on the procyclicality of bank lending and firms' access to funds. In response to an exogenous shock to credit risk in the German economy, capital charges for loans under model-based regulation increased by 0.5 percentage points. As a consequence, banks reduced the amount of these loans by 2.1 to 3.9 percentage points more than for loans under the traditional approach with fixed capital charges. We find an even stronger effect when we examine aggregate firm borrowing, suggesting that microprudential capital regulation can have sizeable real effects.

The availability of credit varies over the business cycle through shifts in the leverage of financial intermediaries. Empirically, we find that intermediary leverage is negatively aligned with the banks' Value-at-Risk (VaR). Motivated by the evidence, we explore a contracting model that captures the observed features. Under general conditions on the outcome distribution given by extreme value theory (EVT), intermediaries maintain a constant probability of default to shifts in the outcome distribution, implying substantial deleveraging during downturns. For some parameter values, we can solve the model explicitly, thereby endogenizing the VaR threshold probability from the contracting problem.

Are there times when durable spending is less responsive to economic stimulus? We argue that aggregate durable expenditures respond more sluggishly to economic shocks during recessions because microeconomic frictions lead to declines in the frequency of households' durable adjustment. We show this by first using indirect inference to estimate a heterogeneous agent incomplete markets model with fixed costs of durable adjustment to match consumption dynamics in PSID microdata. We then show that aggregating this model delivers an extremely procyclical Impulse Response Function (IRF) of durable spending to aggregate shocks. For example, the response of durable spending to an income shock in 1999 is estimated to be almost twice as large as if it occurred in 2009. This procyclical IRF holds in response to standard business cycle shocks as well as in response to various policy shocks, and it is robust to general equilibrium. After estimating this robust theoretical implication of micro frictions, we provide additional direct empirical evidence for its importance using both cross-sectional and time-series data.

Economic policymakers express concern that procyclical lending by banks imperils financial stability. Prior research finds that banks that record timelier loan loss provisions originate more loans during downturns, consistent with loan loss–provision timeliness mitigating loan-origination procyclicality. Motivated by this concern and research, we examine whether banks’ credit risk modeling disciplines both their loan loss provisions and loan origination. We identify two forms of credit risk modeling from banks’ financial report disclosures: statistical modeling of the drivers of past loan losses and stress testing of future loan losses to adverse scenarios. We show that banks’ credit risk–modeling disclosures are positively associated with their loan loss–provision timeliness, with the ability of their provisions to predict future loan charge-offs, and with their loan origination during downturns. We further show that these associations vary in predictable ways across the two forms of credit risk modeling when we distinguish homogeneous from heterogeneous loans and stable periods from downturns. This paper was accepted by Mary Barth, accounting.

The authors investigate whether, and to what extent, marketing conduct varies over the business cycle and how this contributes to the growing popularity of private labels. To address this issue, they examine a unique data set that combines a broad set of seven marketing-mix instruments with private-label share, using two decades' worth of data for 106 consumer packaged goods categories in the United States. The results show that private-label share behaves countercyclically and that part of the boost in private-label share during contractions is permanent. Retailers' observed practice of supporting their own labels in contraction periods while cutting back in expansion periods helps this cyclical sensitivity even further. In addition, national brands' procyclical behavior in terms of (1) major new product introductions, (2) advertising, and (3) their promotional pressure compared with private labels is associated with more pronounced cyclical fluctuations in private-label share and even with permanent private-label market share gains. Although brand managers cannot be held responsible for the occurrence of economic downswings, they can be held accountable for how much contractions help strengthen their fiercest competitor, the store brands owned by their very customers.

Macroprudential policies-caps on loan to value ratios, limits on credit growth and other balance-sheet restrictions, (countercyclical) capital and reserve requirements and surcharges, and Pigouvian levies-have become part of the policy paradigm in emerging markets and developed countries alike. But knowledge of these tools is still limited. Macroprudential policies ought to be motivated by market failures and externalities, but these can be hard to identify. They may also interact with various other policies, such as monetary and microprudential, raising coordination issues. Countries, especially emerging markets, have used these tools, and analyses suggest that some of those tools reduce procyclicality and crisis risks. Yet, much remains to be studied, including the costs of such tools, as they may adversely affect resource allocations; how best to adapt these tools to a country's circumstances; and preferred institutional designs, including how to address political economy risks. As such, policy makers should move carefully in adopting these tools.

Fiscal policy is procyclical in many developing countries. We explain this policy failure with a political agency problem. Procyclicality is driven by voters who seek to \"starve the Leviathan\" to reduce political rents. Voters observe the state of the economy but not the rents appropriated by corrupt governments. When they observe a boom, voters optimally demand more public goods or lower taxes, and this induces a procyclical bias in fiscal policy. The empirical evidence is consistent with this explanation: Procyclicality of fiscal policy is more pronounced in more corrupt democracies.

The cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level investment rates is procyclical. This makes investment rates different from productivity, output, and employment growth, which have countercyclical dispersions. A calibrated heterogeneous-firm business cycle model with nonconvex capital adjustment costs and countercyclical dispersion of firm-level productivity shocks replicates these facts and produces a correlation between investment dispersion and aggregate output of 0.53, close to 0.45 in the data. We find that small shocks to the dispersion of productivity, which in the model constitutes firm risk, suffice to generate the mildly procyclical investment dispersion in the data but do not produce serious business cycles.

Over the postwar period, many industrialized countries have experienced significant medium-frequency oscillations between periods of robust growth versus relative stagnation. Conventional business cycle filters, however, tend to sweep these oscillations into the trend. In this paper we explore whether they may, instead, reflect a persistent response of economic activity to the high-frequency fluctuations normally associated with the cycle. We define as the medium-term cycle the sum of the high-and medium-frequency variation in the data, and then show that these kinds of fluctuations are substantially more volatile and persistent than are the conventional measures. These fluctuations, further, feature significant procyclical movements in both embodied and disembodied technological change, and research and development (R&D), as well as the efficiency and intensity of resource utilization. We then develop a model of medium-term business cycles. A virtue of the framework is that, in addition to offering a unified approach to explaining the high- and mediumfrequency variation in the data, it fully endogenizes the movements in productivity that appear central to the persistence of these fluctuations. For comparison, we also explore how well an exogenous productivity model can explain the facts.