In addressing the precipitous drop in trade volumes in the recent crisis, the real and financial explanations have sometimes been juxtaposed as competing explanations. However, they can be reconciled by appeal to the time dimension of production and the working capital demands associated with...

The technological constraints on sustaining production chains have been discussed extensively by development economists, but the role of financial linkages has received less attention. In a model of recursive moral hazard for a manufacturing supply chain, we show that the structure of...

FocusOur paper provides a fresh take on the way the US dollar exchange rate influences the volume of global trade. We take as our starting point the substantial financing needs of the long supply chains, or global value chains (GVCs), that underpin trade in manufactured goods. These financial...

This paper presents a "time-to-build" theory of supply chains which implies a key role for the financing of working capital as a determinant of supply chain length. We apply our theory to offshoring and trade, where firms strike a balance between the productivity gain due to offshoring against...