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    Real Credit Cycles
    09 Mar 2021Working Paper Summaries

    Real Credit Cycles

    by Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, and Stephen J. Terry
    The financial crisis of 2008 renewed economists’ interest in financial fragility, specifically understanding its origins. This paper shows how market participants’ expectations can be part of standard macroeconomic models and significantly improve their explanatory power.
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    Author Abstract

    We incorporate diagnostic expectations, a psychologically founded model of overreaction to news, into a workhorse business cycle model with heterogeneous firms and risky debt. A realistic degree of diagnosticity, estimated from the forecast errors of managers of U.S. listed firms, creates financial fragility during good times. This mechanism produces countercyclical credit spreads and yields two key features of observed credit cycles. First, it generates boom-bust dynamics at the firm and aggregate levels: cheap credit predicts future increases in spreads, low bond returns, and investment drops. Second, it produces the spike in spreads observed in 2008–9 from modest negative TFP shocks. Diagnostic expectations offer a parsimonious mechanism generating realistic financial reversals in conventional business cycle models.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: January 2021
    • HBS Working Paper Number: NBER Working Paper Series, No. 28416
    • Faculty Unit(s): Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
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    Andrei Shleifer
    Andrei Shleifer
    Visiting Professor of Business Administration
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