Borrowing Constraints in Emerging Markets

TL;DR

This paper reveals that in emerging markets, most firm borrowing is based on cash flows rather than collateral, leading to stronger effects of interest rate shocks and implications for exchange rate policies.

Contribution

It identifies interest coverage constraints as the dominant borrowing constraint in EMs and demonstrates their significant impact on macroeconomic shock amplification.

Findings

Less than 15% of EM firm debt is collateral-based.

Interest coverage constraints are more prevalent in EMs than in advanced economies.

Interest rate shocks have stronger effects in EMs due to these constraints.

Abstract

Borrowing constraints are a key component of modern international macroeconomic models. The analysis of Emerging Markets (EM) economies generally assumes collateral borrowing constraints, i.e., firms access to debt is constrained by the value of their collateralized assets. Using credit registry data from Argentina for the period 1998-2020 we show that less than 15% of firms debt is based on the value of collateralized assets, with the remaining 85% based on firms cash flows. Exploiting central bank regulations over banks capital requirements and credit policies we argue that the most prevalent borrowing constraints is defined in terms of the ratio of their interest payments to a measure of their present and past cash flows, akin to the interest coverage borrowing constraint studied by the corporate finance literature. Lastly, we argue that EMs exhibit a greater share of interest sensitive borrowing constraints than the US and other Advanced Economies. From a structural point of view, we show that in an otherwise standard small open economy DSGE model, an interest coverage borrowing constraints leads to significantly stronger amplification of foreign interest rate shocks compared to the standard collateral constraint. This greater amplification provides a solution to the Spillover Puzzle of US monetary policy rates by which EMs experience greater negative effects than Advanced Economies after a US interest rate hike. In terms of policy implications, this greater amplification leads to managed exchange rate policy being more costly in the presence of an interest coverage constraint, given their greater interest rate sensitivity, compared to the standard collateral borrowing constraint.