The External Finance Premium and the Macroeconomy: US post-WWII Evidence

The central variable of theories of financial frictions -the external finance premium- is unobservable. This paper distils the external .finance premium from a DSGE model estimated on US macroeconomic data. Within the DSGE framework, movements in the premium can be given an interpretation in terms of shocks driving business cycles. A key result is that the estimate -based solely on non-.financial macroeconomic data- picks up over 70% of the dynamics of lower grade corporate bond spreads. The paper also identifies a gain in .fitting key macroeconomic aggregates by including .financial frictions in the model and documents how shock transmission is affected.