Tonight’s subject is one that has attracted increasing attention over recent years – namely, the growth of household debt. There is no doubt that this debt has grown quickly over the past decade, and this has prompted a number of people to suggest that it is too high and that it presents a threat to the future health of the economy. What I would like to do tonight is to examine household debt f...

Moody's ratings for tax-backed municipal bonds are derived from five primary credit factors: legal security, local economy , financial operations, debt profile and management. This special comment will focus on the debt component of Moody's analysis and ratings. Debt as a credit factor can not be isolated from the other credit factors, nor viewed as a stand-alone ratio or set of ratios. Rather,...

Brander and Lewis argue in a seminal paper (AER, 1986) that a Þrm’s debt-equity ratio should have important strategic effects on product market competition. We test their model in a duopoly experiment under both, Bertrand and Cournot competition. We Þnd that leverage has strategic effects, but those effects are much weaker than predicted by theory. SpeciÞcally, we Þnd for price competition a ge...

While growth has increased in Tanzania during the past five or six years, it is still too low to have a visible impact on poverty. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that the amount of both income and non-income poverty are roughly the same as they were a decade ago. Since debt relief provided under HIPC will free government resources, the initiative will potentially help reduce poverty through l...

The paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic conditions on firms’ capital structure. We introduce a repeated lender-borrower interaction that allows for debt and equity financing to co-exist as optimal securities in every period. The presence of asymmetric information in the market for loans is responsible for endogenous fluctuations to take place.It is possible to state sufficient condi...

We study optimal macroprudential policy in a model in which unconventional shocks, in the form of news about future fundamentals and regime changes in world interest rates, interact with collateral constraints in driving the dynamics of financial crises. These shocks strengthen incentives to borrow in good times (i.e. when “good news” about future fundamentals coincide with a low-world-interest...

We use the August 2007 crisis episode to gauge the causal effect of financial contracting on real firm behavior. We identify heterogeneity in financial contracting at the onset of the crisis by exploiting ex-ante variation in long-term debt maturity structure. Using a difference-in-differences matching estimator approach, we find that firms whose long-term debt was largely maturing right after ...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper analyses the impact of financial sector policy changes on the dynamics of public debt. Using a panel of 89 countries from 1973 to 2005, we find that, overall, while the implementation of financial liberalisation policies significantly raises the public debt growth rate, the adoption of financial re-regulation measures does not reduce it in a significant manner. ...