That's how we roll: an experiment on rollover risk

Abstract We design a continuous-time experiment to study how different short-term credit maturities interact with the state of the economy. We find that, when the economy is in a boom, long maturities stabilize the credit market. Yet, when in a downturn, such maturities increase the likelihood of credit freezes. This result has important regulatory implications, as it suggests that a policy aimed at reducing maturity mismatch in short-term credit markets might backfire during a recession.