Book Description

This thesis contains three essays in empirical macroeconomics. The main focus is on firm financing. In the first chapter, I study the impact of financial covenants on firms' behavior and in particular the impact on investment. Financial covenants are conditions present in almost all bank loan contracts. When a firm does not satisfy those conditions, which are accounting ratios such as a maximal debt to earnings ratio, the bank has the right to call back the loan. In most cases banks use covenant breaches to lower the loan size or adjust other loan terms. I document that around 80% of firms are subject to covenants and most of the covenants are based on a firm's income. For the Great Recession, I use hand-collected data on firms' credit limits to estimate the contribution of income covenants to the credit crunch. I find that about a third of credit line decreases can be plausibly attributed to income covenants. Motivated by these facts, I incorporate an income covenant into an otherwise standard heterogeneous firms model. In a calibrated version of the model I find that income covenants reduce aggregate investment by 1.3% compared to a model without financial frictions. I document that the cost from precaution, i.e. firms borrowing and investing less because they want to avoid a covenant breach, is larger than the direct cost of lower credit supply after a covenant breach. Regressions on simulated firm-level data yield very similar effects of the direct and precautionary effects of income covenants compared to actual data. In the second chapter, Jae-Bin Ahn, Mai Chi Dao and I, document a broad-based increase in cash holdings at the firm level during the last two decades. We build a simple model in which lower trade barriers increase firms' incentives to innovate. Because innovation is risky, firms increase their liquidity holdings when tariffs fall. We test these predictions using firm-level data from five large countries and find that expanding export opportunities and, to a lesser extent, increased import competition, raise cash holdings among incumbent firms. In support of our channel, we find this effect to be stronger among firms investing in R&D. In the third chapter, Simon Fuchs and I look at the global movie market. We show that the revenue share of sequels and adaptations of books has increased dramatically over the last two decades. During the same period the global movie market has become geographically more diverse, i.e. the revenue generated in the US has declined. We connect these two stylized facts in a model where movie studios can release one movie to a market that consists of countries with different taste. Additionally, studios face uncertainty concerning the location of a movie in the taste space. We estimate the global taste space based on market shares. We investigate whether the change in the composition of global demand can account for the increase in the revenue share of sequels. Our current results suggest this is not the case.