Wirtschaftswissenschaften
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Using a unique data set on trade credit defaults among French firms, we investigate whether and how trade credit is used to relax financial constraints. We show that firms that face idiosyncratic liquidity shocks are more likely to default on trade credit, especially when the shocks are unexpected, firms have little liquidity, are likely to be credit constrained or are close to their debt capacity. We estimate that credit constrained firms pass more than one fourth of the liquidity shocks they face on to their suppliers down the trade credit chain. The evidence is consistent with the idea that firms provide liquidity insurance to each other and that this mechanism is able to alleviate the consequences of credit constraints. In addition, we show that the chain of defaults stops when it reaches firms that are large, liquid, and have access to financial markets. This suggests that liquidity is allocated from large firms with access to outside finance to small, credit constrained firms through trade credit chains.
We propose a new approach to measuring the effect of unobservable private information or beliefs on volatility. Using high-frequency intraday data, we estimate the volatility effect of a well identified shock on the volatility of the stock returns of large European banks as a function of the quality of available public information about the banks. We hypothesise that, as the publicly available information becomes stale, volatility effects and its persistence should increase, as the private information (beliefs) of investors becomes more important. We find strong support for this idea in the data. We argue that the results have implications for debate surrounding the opacity of banks and the transparency requirements that may be imposed on banks under Pillar III of the New Basel Accord.
This paper analyses cross-border contagion in a sample of European banks from January 1994 to January 2003. We use a multinomial logit model to estimate the number of banks in a given country that experience a large shock on the same day (“coexceedances”) as a function of variables measuring common shocks and coexceedances in other countries. Large shocks are measured by the bottom 95th percentile of the distribution of the first difference in the daily distance to default of the bank. We find evidence in favour of significant cross-border contagion. We also find some evidence that since the introduction of the euro cross-border contagion may have increased. The results seem to be very robust to changes in the specification.