Michele Andreolli, Graduate Student, London Business School
Abstract: This paper studies the mediating impact of the maturity of public debt in the transmission of monetary policy shocks to economic activity. A longer debt maturity attenuates greatly the effect of monetary policy: going from the average historical duration of US debt to very short term debt doubles the impact of a rise of the policy rate on output. A similar result holds in UK data. Using data on corporate debt, spreads, investment, and fiscal variables, I show that these effects can be traced back to a quantitatively important financing channel. A model featuring an interaction between an empirically estimated primary market friction and a standard financial accelerator is able to account for these facts.