Financial Shock Transmission to Heterogeneous Firms: The Earnings-Based Borrowing Constraint Channel

We study the heterogeneous impact of jointly identified monetary policy and global risk shocks on corporate funding costs. We disentangle these two shocks in a structural Bayesian Vector Autoregression framework and investigate their respective effects on funding costs of heterogeneous firms using micro-data for the US. We tease out mechanisms underlying the effects by contrasting traditional financial frictions arising from asset-based collateral constraints with the recent earnings-based borrowing constraint hypothesis, differentiating firms across leverage and earnings. Our empirical evidence strongly supports the earnings-based borrowing constraint hypothesis. We find that global risk shocks have stronger and more heterogeneous effects on corporate funding costs which depend on firms' position within the earnings distribution.