题　目：Leasing and Falling Interest Rates

嘉　宾：Yiming Xu(许一鸣) Research Fellow Peking University and UNC Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler

主持人：冯芸 金融系主任、教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时　间：2025年1月19日（周日）13:00-14:30

地　点：上海交通大学 徐汇校区安泰楼A305室

内容简介:

This paper argues that leasing significantly changes constrained firms’ investment response to falling interest rates, amplifying the corresponding expansionary effects - a channel previously overlooked in the literature. Prior studies that abstract from leasing suggest that under financial frictions, lower interest rates raise the investment of unconstrained firms but restrict constrained albeit productive firms, reducing aggregate efficiency and attenuating the output boost (Gopinath et al., 2017; Asriyan et al., 2024). We argue that leasing reshapes this relationship through its strong collateralizability and, crucially, through its feature that fees are set by unconstrained lessors, who adjust them downward markedly as interest rates fall. This enables sufficiently constrained firms to expand alongside their unconstrained counterparts, mitigating the attenuation effects. We formalize our insight in a model with heterogeneous firms, collateral constraints, endogenous lease-versus-buy decisions, and a declining interest rate. We provide supportive empirical evidence on how firm investment and capital allocation respond to interest rate shocks, complementing the findings in Ottonello and Winberry (2020).

演讲人简介：

Yiming Xu is currently a research fellow at Peking University HSBC Business School and UNC Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge. His research interests include macro-finance and asset pricing. His current work focuses on exploring the implications of leasing capital on macro-finance allocation efficiency. He has published in Journal of Banking and Finance and Journal of Empirical Finance, and has two papers currently under revise-and-resubmit at Journal of Financial Economics and International Economic Review.

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