Sovereign Default Risk and Firm Heterogeneity
结合主权债务模型与意大利企业银行数据，测算主权风险通过信贷渠道对企业产出的直接与间接影响，发现主权风险上升解释了意大利债务危机期间三分之一的经济下滑。
Abstract This paper measures the output costs of sovereign risk by combining a sovereign debt model with firm- and bank-level data. An increase in sovereign risk lowers the price of government debt and has an adverse impact on banks’ balance sheets, disrupting their ability to finance firms. The resulting fall in credit supply impacts firms directly, as they need to borrow at higher interest rates, and indirectly through general equilibrium effects on the price of inputs and other goods. Importantly, firms are not equally affected by these developments: those that have greater financing needs and that borrow from banks that hold more government debt are mostly affected by the change in borrowing rates, while firms that do not borrow are only impacted indirectly. We show that these direct and indirect effects can be recovered using a firm-level regression, which we estimate using Italian data. We calibrate our model to match the measured firm-level elasticities and find that heightened sovereign risk was responsible for one-third of the observed output decline during the Italian debt crisis.