Quantifying the Macroeconomic Impact of Credit Expansions

Credit expansions stimulate the economy. We quantify the contribution of households versus firms for this stimulus. Using causal evidence from the quasi-natural experiment of bank deregulation across US states, we estimate a small open-economy heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model. Deregulation generated lower borrowing costs. Firms' responses to such shocks account for most of the long-run rise in output and employment. For short-run dynamics, firms and households are equally important. Firms' large role is identified by an empirical observation: output and employment expanded gradually following deregulation. In the model, lower interest rates generate increasing capital stocks which in turn increases economic activity gradually.