The Inventory Channel of Trade Credit: Theory and Evidence

We develop a simple theoretical model with a stochastic demand framework that captures the trade-off between inventories and trade credit. The essence is that the firm is in the middle of a credit chain, and produces goods for sale, holding inventories of goods that were produced but unsold at a cost. In the face of uncertain demand for its products the firm extends trade credit to its financially constrained customers to obtain additional sales. Our model provides directly testable predictions to identify the response of accounts payable and accounts receivable to changes in the cost of inventories, profitability, risk and liquidity, and importantly, this influence operates through a production channel. Our results support the model and complement many existing studies focused on explaining the financial terms of trade credit

Pooling, tranching, and credit expansion

Traditionally banks have used securitization for expanding credit and thus their profitability. It has been well documented that, at least before the 2008 crisis, many banks were keeping a high proportion of the securities that they created on their own balance-sheets. Those securities retained included both the high-risk ‘equity’ tranche and the low-risk AAA-rated tranche. This paper builds a simple model of securitization that accounts for the above retention strategies. Banks in the model retained the equity tranche as skin in the game in order to mitigate moral hazard concerns while they post the low-risk tranche as collateral in order to take advantage of the yield curve. When variations in loan quality are introduced the predicted retention strategies match well those found in empirical studies

Financial system architecture and the patterns of international trade

Countries differ on the extent to which their financial system relies on banks or on the financial market. We offer a model featuring a possible two way relationship between countries’ financial system architecture and their comparative advantage. Countries specialising in bank dependent sectors favour the development of the banking sector. Simultaneously, countries with more efficient capital markets develop comparative advantage in sectors with strong dependence on market finance. To empirically investigate our model’s predictions, we construct a measure of sector bank dependence and establish a strong relationship between countries’ comparative advantage and their financial system architecture

Systemic risk and macroeconomic fat tails

We propose a mechanism for shock amplification that potentially can account for fat tails in the distribution of the growth rate of national output. We argue that extreme macroeconomic events, such as the Great Depression and the Great Recession, were preceded by significant turmoil in the banking system. We have developed a model of bank network formation and presented numerical simulations that show that, for the benchmark case, aggregate credit follows a random walk. When we introduce fire sales the model does not only produce larger variations in the growth of aggregate credit but also shows that there is an asymmetry between booms and busts that is also consistent with empirical evidence

Bank insolvencies, priority claims and systemic risk

We review an extensive literature debating the merits of alternative priority structures for banking liabilities put forward by financial economists, legal scholars and policymakers. Up to now, this work has focused exclusively on the relative advantages of each group of creditors to monitor the activities of bankers. We argue that systemic risk is another dimension that this discussion must include. The main message of our work is that when bank failures are contagious then when regulators assign priority rights need also to take into account how the bankruptcy resolution of one institution might affect the survival of other institutions that have acted as its creditors. When the network structure is fixed the solution is straightforward. Other banks should have priority to minimize the risk of their downfall. However, if the choice of policy can affect the structure of the network, policy design becomes more complex.This is a fruitful avenue for future research