Slow recoveries: Any role for corporate leverage?

This paper examines whether financial conditions of the non-financial corporate sector can explain why the recovery from recessions in the United States is slower since the mid-1980s. Leverage by the corporate sector has increased significantly since the financial deregulation of the mid-1980s. Empirical evidence shows that slow recoveries are associated with a significant drop in the growth rates of investment and bank loans, and with a surge in the growth rates of corporate bonds. In an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with a financial accelerator, counterfactual experiments based on estimates of two samples – 1965–1983 and 1984–2007 – show that the non-financial corporate indebtedness affects only marginally the speed of the recovery in the two samples.