Trade Credit, Markups, and Relationships

Alvaro Garcia-Marin, Santiago Justel () and Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr

No 1303, International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: Trade credit is the most important form of short-term finance for firms. In 2019, U.S. non-financial firms had about $4.5 trillion in trade credit outstanding equaling 21 percent of U.S. GDP. This paper documents two striking facts about trade credit use. First, firms with higher markups supply more trade credit. Second, trade credit use increases in relationship length, as firms often switch from cash in advance to trade credit but rarely away from trade credit. These two facts can be rationalized in a model where firms learn about their trading partners, sellers charge markups over production costs, and financial intermediation is costly. The model also shows that saving on financial intermediation costs provides a strong rationale for the dominance of trade credit. Using Chilean data at the firm-product-level and the trade-transaction level, we find support for all predictions of the model.

Keywords: Trade credit; Markups; Financial intermediation; Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F12 F14 G21 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 74
Date: 2020-09-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-bec
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/ifdp/files/ifdp1303.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Trade Credit, Markups, and Relationships (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedgif:1303

DOI: 10.17016/IFDP.2020.1303

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier ().