Future Economic Information Embedded in High Yield Spreads

Abstract

Future Economic Information Embedded in High Yield Spreads

The financial accelerator mechanism, also called credit channel theory (Bernanke and Gertler [1995] and Bernanke and Gertler, and Gilchrist [1996]), assumes external financing is more costly than internal financing in the absence of full collateralization. The difference between external and internal costs is called “external finance premium” and arises from agency costs associated with asymmetric information about the firm’s net worth, defined as the sum of all liquid and illiquid assets minus debt. The external finance premium is inversely related to the firm’s net worth.

Firms with poor credit are at the heart of the financial accelerator mechanism, and one can proxy for “external finance premium” using the spread paid by the poor-quality (high-yield) firms over the high-quality firms. In the parlance of the “financial accelerator mechanism,” a reduction of high-yield spread is the harbinger of future boom, and an increase in high-yield spread predicts a decline in economic activity. This article examines the significance of the spread variable to predict various economic variables. We control for momentum in the economic variable by including the four lagged quarters of the economic variable. We look at the growth rate of a broad spectrum of the economy; having tested the relationship between 84 economic measures and the four lagged measures of growth in high-yield spread, we report that 58 of the economic variables tested have statistically significant coefficients.

Keywords: credit channel theory, collateral, financial accelerator mechanism

JEL Classification: G10