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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Great Recession featured a large decline in output and labor, tighter financial conditions, and a large increase in firm growth dispersion. We build a model in which increased volatility at the firm level generates a downturn and worsened credit conditions. The key idea is that hiring inputs is risky because financial frictions limit firmsfiability to insure against shocks. An increase in volatility induces firms to reduce their inputs to reduce such risk. Our model can generate most of the decline in output and labor in the Great Recession and the observed increase in firmsfiinterest rate spreads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the recent U.S. financial crisis, the large decline in aggregate output and labor was accompanied by both a tightening of financial conditions and a large increase in the dispersion of growth rates across firms. The tightened financial conditions manifested themselves as increases in firms' credit spreads and decreases in both equity payouts and debt purchases. These features motivate us to build a model in which increased volatility of firm level productivity shocks generates a downturn and worsened credit conditions. The key idea in the model is that hiring inputs is risky because financial frictions limit firms ability to insure against shocks. Hence, an increase in idiosyncratic volatility induces firms to reduce their inputs to reduce such risk. We find that our model can generate most of the decline in output and labor in the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the observed tightening of financial conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This appendix contains five sections. Section 1 provides details for the comparative statics exercise performed in the simple example. Section 2 discusses extending the model to allow firms to default on the wages for managers. Section 3 describes the firm-level and aggregate data. Section 4 contains the details of the computational algorithm. Finally, Section 5 reports the results for our model with a lower labor elasticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]