Do Credit Market Shocks affect the Real Economy? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Great Recession and ‘Normal’ Economic Times

Michael Greenstone, University of Chicago, mgreenst@uchicago.edu; Alexandre Mas, Princeton, amas@princeton.edu; Hoai-Luu Nguyen, MIT, HQN@mit.edu We are grateful to Laurien Gilbert, Felipe Goncalves, Ernest Liu, and Steven Mello for excellent research assistance. We thank Daron Acemoglu, Pat Kline, Lawrence Summers, Ivan Werning, and seminar participants at the NBER Summer Institute, Columbia, Brookings, Boston Federal Reserve, and Bank of Mexico for helpful comments. We also thank Abigail Cooke, Javier Miranda, and Lars Vilhuber for enabling our use of the Census LBD microdata. The first version of this paper was released in November 2012. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.