Debt Sustainability in a Low Interest Rate World

Neil Mehrotra
Additional contact information
Neil Mehrotra: Brown University

No 285, 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: Drawing on a new, confidential Census Bureau dataset of financial statements of a representative sample of 80000 manufacturing firms from 1977 and 2014, we provide new evidence on the link between size, cyclicality, and financial frictions. First, we only find evidence of lower cyclicality among the very largest firms (the top 1% by size). Second, due to high and rising concentration of sales and investment, the lower sensitivity of the top 1% firms dominates the behavior of aggregate fluctuations. Third, we show that this differential sensitivity does not appear to be driven by financial frictions. The higher sensitivity of the bottom 99% does not disappear after controlling for measures of financial strength, is not statistically significant after identified monetary policy shocks, and does not appear in debt financing flows. Evidence from 3-digit industries suggests a non-financial explanation: the largest 1% of firms are less sensitive due to a more diversified customer base.

Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2018/paper_285.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed018:285

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().