Using unique daily data on payment defaults to suppliers in France, we show how the trade credit channel amplified the Covid-19 shock, during the first months of the pandemic. It dramatically increased short-term liquidity needs in the most impacted downstream sectors: a one standard deviation...

Using a novel dataset of supplier-customer relationships, I develop measures of vertical position of public and private firms in the US economy in order to test trade credit theories. Firms at higher vertical positions have higher profit margins and hold more net trade credit even after...

During the transition period from a planned economy to a market economy in the 1990s of China, there was a considerable accrual of deferred payment, and default due to inferior enforcement institutions. This is a very common phenomenon in the transition economies at that time. The Chinese...

We document that industry positions in the product market network – a feature exogenous to individual firms – significantly influences firms' use and extension of trade credit. Specifically, firms in higher centrality customer industries use more trade credit and firms in higher centrality...

Trade credit is differentiated from other lending channels by the underlying sales relationship. Using a unique hand-collected dataset of customer-supplier-matched trade credit, I examine how the importance of a customer's sales to its supplier affects trade credit decisions. Contrary to...

Trade credit is one of the most important sources of short-term finance in buyer-seller transactions.This paper studies a seller's trade credit provision decision in a situation of repeated contracting withincomplete information over the buyer's ability and willingness of payment compliance when...

This paper investigates whether firms with direct access to capital markets 'help out' firms who are reliant on credit from banks by extending more trade credit when times are hard. Taking up a theme of Meltzer (1960) it asks, whether there is a 'trade credit channel' that offsets the bank...

Despite the importance of the hypothesis that trade creditors may act as relationship lenders, it has been virtually impossible to directly test this hypothesis because of a lack of data. We attempt to overcome this problem by using a relatively new Japanese database on small and midsized...

Using a sample of distressed firms with information about suppliers, we document an average fall in the use of trade credit as firms approach bank-ruptcy compared to a control sample of non-bankrupt firms. However, we uncover a large degree of heterogeneity across suppliers. Suppliers facing...

In contrast to common literature that suggests that trade credit is an extremely expensive source of financing with annual interest rates exceeding 40 percent, this paper argues that the average interest rate of trade credit does not exceed the cost of alternative funds, with estimated average...