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Working Paper
No Guarantees, No Trade: How Banks Affect Export Patterns
How relevant are financial instruments to manage risk in international trade for exporting? Employing a unique dataset of U.S. banks' trade finance claims by country, this paper estimates the effect of shocks to the supply of letters of credit on U.S. exports. We show that a one-standard deviation negative shock to a country's supply of letters of credit reduces U.S. exports to that country by 1.5 percentage points. This effect is stronger for smaller and poorer destinations. It more than doubles during crisis times, suggesting a non-negligible role for finance in explaining the Great Trade ...
Working Paper
The Dollar Channel of Monetary Policy Transmission
This paper documents a new dollar channel that transmits monetary policy across borders. Exploiting unique features of the syndicated loan market for identification, we show that changes in the euro-dollar exchange rate around ECB monetary policy announcements that are orthogonal to simultaneous changes in euro-area interest rates and stock prices affect U.S. leveraged loan spreads. Specifically, in response to dollar appreciation, investors require higher compensation for risk, and borrowing costs for U.S. firms increase. These findings imply a causal link between the U.S. dollar and ...
Newsletter
How Central Bank Swap Lines Affect the Leveraged Loan Market
The cost of borrowing U.S. dollars through foreign exchange (FX) swap markets increased significantly at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in February 2020, indicated by larger deviations from covered interest rate parity (CIP). CIP deviations narrowed again when the Federal Reserve expanded its swap lines to support U.S. dollar liquidity globally—by enhancing and extending its swap facility with foreign central banks and introducing the new temporary Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) repurchase agreement facility for foreign and international monetary authorities. ...
Working Paper
Learning and the Value of Trade Relationships
This paper quantifies the value of importer-exporter relationships. We show that almost 80 percent of U.S. imports take place in pre-existing relationships, with sizable heterogeneity across countries, and show that traded quantities and survival increase as relationships age. We develop a two-country general equilibrium trade model with learning that is consistent with these facts. A model-based measure of relationship value explains survival during the 2008-09 crisis. Knowledge accumulated within long-term relationships is quantitatively important: wiping out all memory from previous ...
Report
No guarantees, no trade: how banks affect export patterns
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 in a country, the larger should be the effect on exports to that country if the bank changes its supply of letters of credit. We find that a shock of one standard deviation to a country?s supply of letters of credit increases export growth, on average, by 1.5 percentage points. The effect is larger for ...
Report
International Trade, Risk and the Role of Banks
Banks play a critical role in international trade by providing trade finance products that reduce the risk of exporting. This paper employs two new data sets to shed light on the magnitude and structure of this business, which, as we show, is highly concentrated in a few large banks. The two principal trade finance instruments, letters of credit and documentary collections, covered about 10 percent of U.S. exports in 2012. They are preferred for larger transactions, which indicates the existence of substantial fixed costs in the provision and use of these instruments. Letters of credit are ...
Working Paper
The Dollar and Corporate Borrowing Costs
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 that a one standard deviation increase in the dollar index increases spreads by up to 15 basis points and reduces loan amounts and underpricing by up to 2 percent and 7 basis points, respectively. These effects are concentrated in dollar appreciations. Our results suggest that global factors reflected ...