Commercial Paper, Corporate Finance, and the Business Cycle: a Microeconomic Perspective*
Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 42 (1995) 203-250 Noah-Holland Commercial paper, corporate finance, and the business cycle: a microeconomic perspective* Charles W. Calomiris t University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820 National Bureau of Economic Research Charles P. Himmelberg Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, NY 10012 Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago and Paul Wachtel Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, NY 10012 Abstract Little is known about the characteristics or behavior of commercial paper is- suers at the firm level, or about the reasons for the countercyclieal issuance of commercial paper in the aggregate. In order to examine these issues we construct a new panel data-set linking Moody's data on commercial paper outstanding with Standard and Poor's Compustat. *The authors would like to express their gratitude for many helpful comments from Douglas Diamond, Mark Gertler, Simon Gilchrist, Anil Kashyap, Randy Kroszner, Ken Kuttner, Allan Meltzer, Bruce Petersen, and the participants at seminars at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, New York University, the University of Chicago, the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute, and the Carnegie-Rochester Conference on Public Policy. Finally, we thank Jerome Fons for making the Moody's commercial paper data available, Peter Rousseau for his help in preparing the data set, and Butt Porter and Arjun aayaraman for their assistance. t Correspondence to: Charles W. Calomiris, Department of Finance, University of Illi- nois, Champaign, IL 61820. 0167-2231/95/$09.50/© 1995 - Elsevier Science B.V.
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