This paper establishes a causal link between the dollar exchange rate and international trade flows, employing a new instrument for the U.S. Dollar that is based on domestic U.S. housing activity (Ma and Zhang (2019)). In line with the dominant currency paradigm (Gopinath et al. (2020)), import...

This paper provides evidence that the U.S. dollar affects countries' exports through the financial channel of the exchange rate (Bruno and Shin (2015)). Using global data on trade between countries whose currency is not the U.S. dollar, it documents a positive relationship between the dollar and...

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...

Financial institutions are increasingly linked internationally. As a result, financial crisis and government intervention have stronger effects beyond borders. We provide a model of international contagion allowing for bank bailouts. While a social planner trades off tax distortions, liquidation...

Rent-sharing between firm owners and workers is a robust empirical finding. If workers bargain with firms, information on the actual surplus is essential. When the firm can use profit shifting to create private information on the surplus, it can thereby reduce its wage bill. We study how rent...

How valuable are long-term supplier relationships? To address this question, this paper explores relationships between U.S. importers and their suppliers abroad. We first establish several facts: almost half of U.S. imports are in relationships three years or older, relationship survival and...

When trading, firms choose between different payment contracts. As shown theoretically in Schmidt-Eisenlohr (forthcoming), this allows firms in international trade to optimally trade-off differences in financing costs and enforcement across countries. This paper provides evidence from a large...

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...

We show that U.S. dollar movements affect syndicated loan terms for U.S. borrowers, even for those without trade exposure. We identify the effect of dollar movements using spread and loan amount adjustments during the syndication process. Using this high-frequency, within loan variation, we find...