This paper shows that credit default swaps (CDS) can affect the type of debt firms issue. Firms face a trade‐off between investment scale and the cost of capital measured by the credit spread. Small‐scale investment is safe, fully collateralized, but earns modest profits in all states. Large‐scale investment is risky, requires a positive credit spread, but yields high profits only in good states and default in bad states. CDS only affect risky credit spreads, which in turn affects the opportunity cost of issuing collateralized, safe debt. Covered (Naked) CDS lower (raise) credit spreads and raise (lower) the likelihood of issuing risky debt. Finally, we show that CDS generate credit spread and investment spillovers for non‐CDS‐referenced firms.

We construct a novel U.S. data set that matches bank holding company credit default swap (CDS) positions to detailed U.S. credit registry data containing both loan and corporate bond holdings to study the effects of banks' CDS use on corporate credit quality. Banks may use CDS to mitigate agency frictions and not renegotiate loans with solvent but illiquid borrowers resulting in poorer measures of credit risk. Alternatively, banks may lay off the credit risk of high quality borrowers through the CDS market to comply with riskbased capital requirements, which does not impact corporate credit risk. We find new evidence that corporate default probabilities and downgrade likelihoods, if anything, are slightly lower when banks purchase CDS against their borrowers. The results are consistent with banks using CDS to efficiently lay off credit risk rather than inefficiently liquidate firms.

We construct a novel U.S. data set that matches bank holding company credit default swap (CDS) positions to detailed U.S. credit registry data containing both loan and corporate bond holdings to study the effects of banks' CDS use on corporate credit quality. Banks may use CDS to mitigate agency frictions and not renegotiate loans with solvent but illiquid borrowers resulting in poorer measures of credit risk. Alternatively, banks may lay off the credit risk of high quality borrowers through the CDS market to comply with riskbased capital requirements, which does not impact corporate credit risk. We find new evidence that corporate default probabilities and downgrade likelihoods, if anything, are slightly lower when banks purchase CDS against their borrowers. The results are consistent with banks using CDS to efficiently lay off credit risk rather than inefficiently liquidate firms.

This paper highlights two new effects of credit default swap markets (CDS) in a general equilibrium setting. First, when firms' cash flows are correlated, CDSs impact the cost of capital-credit spreads-and investment for all firms, even those that are not CDS reference entities. Second, when firms internalize the credit spread changes, the incentive to issue safe rather than risky bonds is fundamentally altered. Issuing safe debt requires a transfer of profits from good states to bad states to ensure full repayment. Alternatively, issuing risky bonds maximizes profits in good states at the expense of default in bad states.Profits fall when credit spreads increase, which raises the opportunity cost of issuing risky debt compared to issuing safe debt. Symmetrically, lower credit spreads reduce the opportunity cost of issuing risky debt relative to safe debt.CDSs affect the credit spread at which firms issue risky debt, and ultimately the opportunity cost of issuing defaultable bonds even when underlying firm fundamentals remain unchanged. Hedging (Speculating on) credit risk lowers (raises) credit spreads and enlarges (reduces) the parameter region over which firms choose to issue risky debt.2

We study how competition between banks and non-banks affects lending standards. Banks have private information about some borrowers and are subject to capital requirements to mitigate risk-taking incentives from deposit insurance. Non-banks are uninformed and market forces determine their capital structure. We show that lending standards monotonically increase in bank capital requirements. Intuitively, higher capital requirements raise banks’ skin in the game and screening out bad projects assures positive expected lending returns. Non-banks enter the market when capital requirements are sufficiently high, but do not cause a deterioration in lending standards. Optimal capital requirements trade-off inefficient lending to bad projects under loose standards with inefficient collateral liquidation under tight standards.

This paper studies optimal debt maturity when firms cannot issue state contingent claims and must back promises with collateral. We establish a tradeoff between long-term borrowing costs and short-term rollover costs. Issuing both long-and short-term debt balances financing costs because different debt maturities allow firms to cater risky promises across time to investors most willing to hold risk. Contrary to existing theories predicated on information frictions or liquidity risk, we show that collateral is sufficient to explain the joint issuance of different types of debt: safe "money-like" debt, risky short-and longterm debt. The model predicts that borrowing costs are lowest, leading to more leverage and production, when firms issue multiple debt maturities. Lastly, we show that "hard" secured debt covenants are redundant when collateral is scarce because they act as perfect substitutes for short-term debt.

Using administrative firm-bank-loan level data, we document new facts about the U.S. credit market and monetary policy transmission. Private firms that are mostly small-medium-sizeenterprises (SMEs) borrow from banks and use their enterprise's continuation value as collateral. Relative to large publicly listed firms, monetary expansions increase highly levered SMEs' demand for credit and their borrowing capacity because their continuation values rise and their ability to repay debt improves. Our results imply that the effectiveness of monetary policy depends on both the firm-size distribution and the type of collateral pledged.

We study how adverse selection distorts equilibrium investment allocations in a Walrasian credit market with two-sided heterogeneity. Representative investor and partial equilibrium economies are special cases where investment allocations are distorted above perfect information allocations. By contrast, the general setting features a pecuniary externality that leads to trade and investment allocations below perfect information levels. The degree of heterogeneity between informed agents' type governs the direction of the distortion. Moreover, contracts that complete markets dampen the impact of pecuniary externalities and change equilibrium distortions. Implications for empirical design in credit market studies and financial stability are discussed.