The Federal Reserve Board eagle logo links to Board's home page

International Finance Discussion Papers
The International Finance Discussion Papers logo links to the International Finance Discussion Papers home page Firm Default and Aggregate Fluctuations
Tor Jacobson, Jesper Lindé, and Kasper Roszbach
2011-1029  (August 2011)

Abstract:  This paper studies the relationship between macroeconomic fluctuations and corporate defaults while conditioning on industry affiliation and an extensive set of firm-specific factors. By using a panel data set for virtually all incorporated Swedish businesses over 1990-2009, a period which includes a full-scale banking crisis, we find strong evidence for a substantial and stable impact from aggregate fluctuations on business defaults. A standard logit model with financial ratios augmented with macroeconomic factors can account surprisingly well for the outburst in business defaults during the banking crisis, as well as the subsequent fluctuations in default frequencies. Moreover, the effects of macroeconomic variables differ across industries in an economically intuitive way. Out-of-sample evaluations show that our approach is superior to models that exclude macro information and standard well-fitting time-series models. Our analysis shows that firm-specific factors are useful in ranking firms' relative riskiness, but that macroeconomic factors are necessary to understand fluctuations in the absolute risk level.

Full paper (1397 KB PDF) | Full paper (screen reader version)

Keywords
Default, default-risk model, business cycles, aggregate fluctuations, micro-data, logit, firm-specific variables, macroeconomic variables

PDF files: Adobe Acrobat Reader   ZIP files: PKWARE


Home | IFDPs | List of 2011 IFDPs
Accessibility | Contact Us
Last update: September 7, 2011