This paper evaluates the impact of two export finance support schemes: The Export Finance Scheme (EFS) and the Long-Term Finance Facility for Plant & Machinery (LTFF) on firm-level export performance. These policies offer loans to exporters at concessionary interest rates to finance short-term...

Many countries offer state credit guarantee programs to improve access to finance for exporting firms. In the case of Germany, accumulated returns to the scheme deriving from risk-compensating premia have outweighed accumulated losses over the past 60 years. Why do private financial agents not...

Reportedly, firms often find it impossible to finance large and long-term projects despite positive net present values. Should governments step in and can their assistance be effective? This paper studies the case of public export credit guarantees in Germany. Covering the default risk of...

Shipping goods internationally is risky and takes time. To allocate risk and to finance the time gap between production and sale, a range of payment contracts is utilized. I study the optimal choice between these payment contracts considering one shot transactions, repeated transactions and...

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...

This study provides evidence that shocks to the supply of trade finance have a causal effect on U.S. exports. The identification strategy exploits variation in the importance of banks as providers of letters of credit across countries. The larger a U.S. bank's share of the trade finance market...

While conditions in trade finance markets returned to normality in the main routes of trade, the structural difficulties of poor countries in accessing trade finance have not disappeared - and might have been worsened during and after the global financial crisis. In fact, there is a consistent...

Trade finance, particularly in the form of short-term letters of credit has received favourable capital treatment new Basel III rules. However, concerns have been expressed over the potential negative "unintended consequences" of the newly created leverage ratio for trade. This paper offers a...

This paper introduces finance or credit in the Dixit-Stiglitz-Krugman (DSK) model of international trade. It identifies mechanisms by which finance can affect the main results of the conventional model. The key results are as follows. Perfect credit market does not affect number of varieties or...

Developments in trade finance in 2020 were largely driven by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Twelve years after the great financial crisis of 2008-09, the issue of trade finance re-emerged as a matter of urgency. While the current pandemic-related crisis did not have a financial cause, one...