Suppliers as financial intermediaries: Trade credit for undervalued firms

The Impact of Macroeconomic Uncertainty on Trade Credit for Non–Financial Firms

In this paper we hypothesize that greater macroeconomic uncertainty would cause firms to increasingly turn to their suppliers as a source of finance, making greater use of trade credit. We test this hypothesis using a panel of non–financial firms drawn from the annual COMPUSTAT database and show that an increase in macroeconomic uncertainty leads to a narrowing of the cross–sectional distributi...

Trade Credit and Credit Rationing in Canadian Firms

Burkart and Ellingsen’s (2004) model of trade credit and bank credit rationing predicts that trade credit will be used by medium-wealth and low-wealth firms to help ease bank credit rationing. The author tests these and other predictions of Burkart and Ellingsen’s model using a large sample of more than 28,000 Canadian firms. She uses an endogenous method to divide the firms into the appropriat...

Trade Credit versus Bank Credit during Financial Crises

Trade Credit, Collateral, and Adverse Selection

We show how trade credit use depends on the value of collateral in a repossession, as well as the extent to which firms face adverse selection problems when dealing with an outside investor. The theory explains: why trade credit is short term credit, why firms simultaneously take and extend credit to other firms with similar levels of creditworthiness, why firms whose prospects start to deterio...

Online Procurement Intermediaries with Differentiated Suppliers*

Industrial buyers who seek to procure inputs have the option of contracting the process out to procurement intermediaries. Many of these intermediaries now operate using Internet-based software to enhance the efficiency of their services. We develop a theoretical model of a buyer who wishes to procure an input from one of many differentiated suppliers. The buyer chooses between conducting the p...