How do firms manage recession risks? We solve a dynamic model with stochastic transitioning between recessions and expansions. In recessions, cash flows decline, cash-flow volatility increases, and both default and external financing costs increase. Firms manage the possibility of future...

This paper studies the role of the credit crunch in the severe contraction of economic activity during the 2008-09 global financial crisis, using firm-level data from six emerging Asian economies. After controlling for the effect of falling demand, we find that sales declined by less for firms...

Sovereign debt crises involve debt restructurings characterized by a mix of face-value haircuts and maturity extensions. The prevalence of maturity extensions has been hard to reconcile with economic theory. We develop a model of endogenous debt restructuring that captures key facts of sovereign...

The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in the decades that followed have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. A key question about these proposals that has proved hard to handle is how they in influence the...

We construct a novel signal of bank expectations utilizing confidential data and a regulatory constraint imposed on bank internal capital markets during the 2008 crisis that made internal equity injections to commercial bank subsidiaries difficult to reverse. When the US government initiated a...