Internationally active firms rely intensively on trade credits even though they are considered particularly expensive. This phenomenon has been little explored so far. Our theoretical analysis shows that trade credits can alleviate financial constraints arising from asymmetric information...

We use a broad range of contractual information to assess the empirical relevance of different financial theories of trade credit. The common feature of all financial theories is that suppliers have an advantage over other lenders in financing credit-constrained firms. While the reasons for the...

This paper estimates the impact on the US economy of four types of uncertainty about (i) government spending, (ii) tax changes, (iii) public debt sustainability and (iv) monetary policy. Following a one standard deviation shock, uncertainty about debt sustainability has the largest and most...

Trading relations in Vietnam's emerging private sector are shaped by two market frictions: the difficulty of locating trading partners and the absence of legal enforcement of contracts. Examining relational contracting, we find that a firm trusts its customer enough to offer credit when the...

This paper investigates the role of credit in shaping economic recoveries and tries to shed some light on the phenomenon of creditless recoveries using industry-level data for a large sample of countries. We find that while a failure of the credit stock to recover to its pre-crisis level does...

In this paper we survey the common explanations of barter in transition economies and expose them to detailed survey data on 165 barter deals in Ukraine in 1997. The evidence does not support the notion that soft budget constraints, lack of restructuring, or that the virtual economy are the...

It is typically less profitable for an opportunistic borrower to divert inputs than to divert cash. Suppliers, therefore, may lend more liberally than banks. This simple argument is at the core of our contract theoretic model of trade credit in competitive markets. The model implies that trade...

The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter -a payment in goods rather than cash - allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value added by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction...

This paper demonstrates that the monetary policy of the National Bank of Hungary is restrictive and has ignored the liquidity problems raised by the overhang of inter-enterprise liquidity. The implication is that the success of the transition to market is thereby jeopardized.