Costly default and skewed business cycles

摘要

We augment a simple Real Business Cycle model with financial intermediaries that may default on their liabilities and a financial friction generating social costs of default. We derive a closed-form solution for the general equilibrium of the economy, providing analytical results. Endogenous default generates a negative skew for aggregate variables and a positive skew for credit spreads, as documented in the empirical literature. Larger financial frictions strengthen asymmetry, which amplifies the welfare cost of fluctuations. Macro prudential regulation alleviates both the cost of fluctuations and business-cycle asymmetry, at the expense of a steady-state distortion. Finally, we prove analytically the existence of an optimal level of regulation, which increases with the size of the financial friction. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.