تخصیص نامناسب و اصطکاک بازار مالی: برخی شواهد مستقیم از پراکندگی درهزینه های قرض

Financial frictions distort the allocation of resources among productive units—all else equal, firms whose financing choices are affected by such frictions face higher borrowing costs than firms with ready access to capital markets. As a result, input choices may differ systematically across firms in ways that are unrelated to their productive efficiency. We propose an accounting framework that allows us to assess empirically the magnitude of the loss in aggregate resources due to such misallocation. To a second-order approximation, the framework requires only information on the dispersion in borrowing costs across firms, which we measure—for a subset of U.S. manufacturing firms—directly from the interest rate spreads on their outstanding publicly-traded debt. Given the observed dispersion in borrowing costs, our approximation method implies a relatively modest loss in efficiency due to resource misallocation—on the order of 1 to 2 percent of measured total factor productivity (TFP). In our framework, the correlation between firm size and borrowing costs has no bearing on TFP losses under the assumption that financial distortions and firm-level efficiency are jointly log-normally distributed. To take into account the effect of covariation between firm size and borrowing costs, we consider a more general framework, which dispenses with the assumption of log-normality and which implies somewhat higher estimates of the resource losses—about 3.5 percent of measured TFP. Counterfactual experiments indicate that dispersion in borrowing costs must be an order of magnitude higher than that observed in the U.S. financial data, in order for misallocation—arising from financial distortions—to account for a significant fraction of measured TFP differentials across countries.

et al., 2008; and Hopenyahn, 2011). Similarly, Restuccia and Rogerson (2008) have argued that systematic and persistent differences in the allocation of resources across production units of varying productivity may be an important determinant of differences in income per capita across countries, a hypothesis that seems to be borne out by the data. For example, using detailed microdata on manufacturing establishments in China and India, Hsieh and Klenow (2009) estimate that resource misallocation accounts for 30 to 60 percent of the difference between the total factor productivity (TFP) in U.S. manufacturing and the corresponding sectoral TFP in China and India.1

This paper develops a tractable TFP accounting framework that is used to compute the resource loss due the misallocation of inputs in the presence of financial market frictions. To a second-order approximation, our methodology implies that resource losses may be inferred directly from the dispersion in borrowing costs across firms. Using a direct measure of firm-specific borrowing costs, we show that for a subset of U.S. manufacturing firms