Banks play a critical role in facilitating international trade by guaranteeing international payments and thereby … reducing the risk of trade transactions. This paper employs banking data from the U.S. to document new empirical patterns … regarding the use of letters of credit and similar bank guarantees. The analysis reveals that trade finance is a large and …

This study provides evidence that shocks to the supply of trade finance have a causal effect on U.S. exports. The … a U.S. bank's share of the trade finance market in a country is, the larger should be the effect on exports to that … effects on export growth. A shock of one standard deviation to a country's supply of trade finance decreases exports, on …