演講者簡介 : Professor Lenzu received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Chicago in 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Finance at New York University. His research interests are Corporate finance, Industrial organization and productivity, and Banking.
演講摘要 : We build a model with heterogeneous firms and banks to analyze how policy affects credit allocation and long-term economic outcomes. When firms are hit by small negative shocks, conventional monetary policy can restore efficient production through a standard bank lending channel as long as interest rates remain above their effective lower bound. Large shocks necessitate unconventional policy such as regulatory forbearance towards banks to stabilize the economy. Excessive accommodation, however, is contractionary as it induces zombie lending and a “diabolical sorting”, whereby low-capitalization banks extend new credit or evergreen existing loans to low-productivity firms. In a dynamic setting, policy aimed at avoiding short-term recessions can be trapped into protracted low rates and excessive forbearance, due to congestion externalities imposed by zombie lending on healthier firms. The resulting economic sclerosis delays the recovery from transitory shocks, and can even lead to permanent output losses, highlighting the importance of maintaining upfront a well-capitalized banking system.
