Essays on macro-finance

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of Economics, 2016. This work was supported by a dissertation committee consisting of Professor Yan Bai (co-advisor) and Professor Toni Whited (co-advisor), and Professor Olga Itenberg of the Department of Finance at the Simon Business School. Chapter 2 was written in collaboration with Yan Bai and Dan Lu of the Department of Economics. All other work conducted for the dissertation was completed by the student independently.
This dissertation studies the macroeconomic consequences of financial frictions via their roles in determining the capital structures of firms and financial institutions. It consists of two papers in this particular field. The first paper focuses on the capital structure decisions of financial intermediaries and their macroeconomic implications. In this paper, titled "Uncertainty and the Shadow Banking Crisis: A Structural Estimation", I examine the impact of asset return uncertainty on the financing and leverage decisions of shadow banks. Shadow banks play an important role in the modern financial system and are arguably the source of key vulnerabilities leading to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. In this paper, I develop a quantitative framework with endogenous bank default and aggregate uncertainty fluctuation to study the dynamics of shadow banking. I argue that the increase in asset return uncertainty during the crisis results in the spread spike, making it more costly for shadow banks to roll over their debt in the short-term debt market. As a result, these banks are forced to deleverage, leading to a decrease in the credit supply. The model is estimated using a bank-level dataset of shadow banks in the United States. The findings show that uncertainty shocks are able to generate statistics and pathways of leverage, spread, and assets which closely match those observed in the data. Maturity mismatch and asset firesales amplify the impact of the uncertainty shocks. First moment shocks alone can not reproduce the large interbank spread spike, dramatic deleveraging and contraction of the US shadow banking sector during the crisis. The model also allows for policy experiments. I analyze how unconventional monetary policies can help to counter the rise in the interbank spread, thus stabilizing the credit supply. Taking into consideration of bank moral hazard, I find that government bailout might be counterproductive as it might result in more aggressive risk-taking