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A large Brazilian agribusiness lender introduces a new contracting technology: grain warehouses. Using runner-up warehouse locations as a control group, I find that lenders' access to these warehouses permits a new debt contract, i.e. a barter credit repayable in grain, increases borrowers' debt capacity and lowers borrowing costs. The effects are stronger when price insurance is important, for municipalities with weaker courts, and for financially-constrained borrowers. Overall, evidence suggests that creditors alter their organizational design to mitigate credit market imperfections.

We explore how credit market frictions matter for the coessentiality of money and credit. There are high-productivity and low-productivity borrowers. Limited commitment can yield a one-for-one credit limit in accordance with a borrower's productivity. An adverse selection problem caused by asymmetric information, however, makes lenders impose the credit limit of a low-productivity borrower on a high-productivity borrower. If productivities differ sufficiently between borrowers, a high-productivity borrower is credit-constrained and is willing to hold money to compensate for the deficiency of their credit limit, but a low-productivity borrower is not. This eventually implies the coessentiality of money and credit in the sense that the use of both improves the allocation from a social welfare perspective.

Understanding disaggregate channels in the transmission of monetary policy is of crucial importance for effectively implementing policy measures. We extend the empirical econometric literature on the role of production networks in the propagation of shocks along two dimensions. First, we allow for industry-specific responses that vary over time, reflecting non-linearities and cross-sectional heterogeneities in direct transmission channels. Second, we allow for time-varying network structures and dependence. This feature captures both variation in the structure of the production network, but also differences in cross-industry demand elasticities. We find that impacts vary substantially over time and the cross-section. Higher-order effects appear to be particularly important in periods of economic and financial uncertainty, often coinciding with tight credit market conditions and financial stress. Differentials in industry-specific responses can be explained by how close the respective industries are to end-consumers.

Despite international financial disintegration, we document a dramatic increase in dollar borrowing among leveraged Eurozone corporates during the Great Financial Crisis. Using loan-level data, we trace this increase to the twin crisis in the credit market and in funding markets. The reduction in the supply of credit by Eurozone banks caused riskier borrowers to shift to foreign banks, in particular US banks. The coincident rise in the relative cost of euro wholesale funding and the disruptions in the FX swap market caused a rise in dollar borrowing from US banks, especi ally for firms in export-oriented sectors. Although global bank lending is often reported to amplify the international credit cycle, we show that foreign banking acted as a shock absorber that weathered the real consequences of the credit crunch in Europe.

I examine investors' within ESG investment preferences during the COVID‐19 pandemic by investigating the return spillover effects across the three different corporate bonds and equities‐based investment strategies. Investors prefer making investments in ESG leaders in the investment‐grade corporate bond market over ESG leaders in the equity and high yield corporate bond markets during times of uncertainty. It suggests that capital flows away from high yield corporate bond and equity markets to the investment‐grade corporate bond market. Investors find refuge in firms with relatively higher ESG ratings and creditworthiness in the fixed income market over the equity market during crisis periods.

We propose a monetary model with endogenous credit market participation to study the impact of financial inclusion on inequality and welfare. We find that consumption inequality results from differences in agents' decision to access financial services. This heterogeneity generates a pecuniary externality, potentially resulting in some agents over-consuming. Moreover, monetary policy has distributional consequences. To quantify these effects, we calibrate our model to India, accounting for a third of observed consumption inequality. Finally, we analyze various policies aimed at increasing financial inclusion and find that a direct transfer to bank account holders yields the highest welfare and lowest consumption inequality.

This paper examines whether firms that engage in corporate social responsibility activities (CSR firms) manage reported cash flows from operations (CFO) when they have strong credit market incentives. We find that CSR firms near financial distress and those having a long‐term credit rating near the investment/non‐investment grade cutoff are more likely to inflate reported CFO, compared to all other firms. We also find evidence that CSR firms with these credit market incentives appear to resort mainly to classification rather than timing as a tool for managing CFO. Further, we find that the degree of CFO management performed by those CSR firms is more pronounced under weaker corporate governance. Overall, our findings suggest that CSR firms with stronger credit market incentives are more likely to manage CFO, and that such CFO management behavior is likely to be implemented at the expense of shareholders’ interest.

This article investigates the impact of the internationalisation of emerging market currencies on original sin, which is the inability of emerging countries to borrow abroad in local currency. The objective is to assess the role of measures of internationalisation on the currency structure of debt for a set of emerging market countries. We show the favourable impact of the internationalisation process on original sin for the period 2005–2018 using two different measures with a dynamic panel data empirical analysis. The main determinants are the foreign exchange (FX) turnover of the currencies, the economic size of the issuing country, and the Volatility Index (VIX). In this way, we highlight network effects between the functions of a currency. The tests also highlight the existence of inertia in the use of a currency for financial transactions. Finally, the results provide evidence on the role of derivative instruments in supporting the use of emerging market currencies in bond markets.

We investigate the intra‐industry spill‐over effect of defaults in the Chinese bond market by using a sample of public corporate debt securities for the period 2014–2018. We find that both industry portfolios and individual firms witness a strong contagion effect, which further spreads to the primary bond market, triggering a surge in the debt financing cost for default industries. Moreover, this contagion effect is stronger for low‐competition industries and regulated industries, as well as when a default happens to state‐owned enterprises. Better information access and higher bond liquidity alleviate the contagion effect, lending support to the information updates and liquidity dry‐up hypotheses.

Index‐insured loans offer considerable advantages over standalone insurance policies for improving farmers’ access to agricultural credit. However, research on demand for such products and their impact on profitable investment decisions has been limited and conflicting. In this article, we investigate the impact of index insurance on demand for credit and investment decisions using a lab‐in‐the‐field experiment conducted in rural Tanzania. We find that index insurance increases demand for credit and high‐risk high‐return investments.

In an article published in this journal in 2012, the author challenged the conventional wisdom that a major feature of Dodd‐Frank—the mandated clearing and required margining of OTC derivatives—could be expected to achieve a material reduction of the risk of another financial crisis In this article, the author views the dramatic financial fallout from the spread of COVID‐19 in March 2020, when the economic infrastructure of the U S was threatened by extreme disruptions in its stock and bond markets, as providing the first major test of this theory The author's main conclusion from this episode is that the very mechanism that advocates of Dodd‐Frank claimed would reduce systemic risk—the clearing of and imposition of margin requirements on derivatives—played a major role in this acute market dislocation by amplifying stresses on and dramatically reducing market liquidity One major implication of this analysis is that protecting important pieces of the system, such as clearinghouses, is not the same as protecting the entire system;indeed, these two goals are likely to prove to be antithetical under conditions of stress It was only massive injections of liquidity by the Federal Reserve, and not the autonomous operation of the market infrastructure mandated by Dodd‐Frank, that succeeded in stemming the crisis And as this case is meant to suggest, despite clearing mandates and other major regulatory changes designed to minimize systemic risk, the net effect has been to substitute possibly greater liquidity risks for credit risk As a consequence, the soundness of the U S financial system continues to depend on the prompt and effective intervention of the Fed as lender of last resort, with all the attendant moral hazard problems

Index-based insurance offers a climate risk management strategy that can benefit the poor. This article focuses on whether adopting index insurance improves access to financial markets and reduces credit rationing, using empirical analyses focused on Ethiopia. With different identification strategies, including a newly developed method that leverages the varying availability of index insurance across areas, the authors control for potential selection biases by forecasting potential insurance adopters; they apply a cross-sectional double-difference method. Credit rationing can take the form of either supply-side quantity rationing, in which case potential borrowers who need credit are involuntarily excluded from the credit market, or demand-side rationing, such that borrowers self-select and voluntarily withdraw to avoid transaction costs and threats to their collateral. By differentiating supply-side and demand-side forms and employing a direct elicitation method to determine credit rationing status, this study reveals that 38% of sample households are credit constrained. The preferred estimation techniques suggest that index insurance significantly reduces supply-side rationing.

By data of 10,357 individual investors from Renrendai.com, an established peer‐to‐peer (P2P) lending platform in China over the period of 2011–2014, we examine whether investors’ prior investment outcomes influence their subsequent risk‐taking behavior in the credit market. We find strong evidence that a prior trading loss induces greater subsequent risk‐taking. Specifically, investors decrease their number of bids and the bidding amount; and choose listings with a lower interest rate and higher credit grade. The investors who obtain more prior gains become more cautious and take on less posterior risk. Overall, this study complements the lack of relevant research in the credit market.

Using a multi-factor continuous-time model we study the impact of the global financial crisis on the information transmission mechanism between interest rate and equity markets in the US and each of the four major economies (UK, Japan, Germany and Canada). The exchange of information through the return channel shows that the equity markets communicate differently with the short- and long-term interest markets: the linkages between the equity and moneymarkets follow similar patterns across all four major economies, while the feedbacks between the returns on equity and bond markets suggest country-specific relationships with the US The level of interdependence is higher between the equity and long-term bond markets, while within the money-markets context there is evidence of the flight-to-quality phenomenon.

This paper examines the ability of bond and stock markets to predict subsequent GDP growth over a range of horizons for 12 international countries. The results, using linear, probit, time‐ and regime‐varying in‐sample regressions and out‐of‐sample forecasting, confirm the view that both financial markets exhibit predictive power for future output growth. Moreover, there is notable variation within the strength of the predictive relation, for example, predictive power increases during the financial crisis period. Results suggest that while the term structure arguably exhibits stronger predictive power, both series contain distinct predictive information. Notably, predictive power emanating from the stock return series appears stronger over shorter (up to four‐quarter) time horizons, while the term structure series exhibits more consistent predictive power over a range of horizons. Considering different regimes, we observe that the bond market exhibits greater predictive power for a flatter yield curve and lower stock prices relative to fundamentals, while the stock market exhibits greater predictive power for a steeper yield curve and higher relative stock prices. This suggests that the two financial markets exhibit different information content for future output growth. This view is further supported by forecast results whereby a model that includes both financial series outperforms a model that only includes one. Forecast encompassing tests further support the view that stock returns contain additional information over that presented by the term structure alone.

We study risk premiums in the U.S. Treasury bond market from the perspective of a Bayesian econometrician BLwho learns in real time from disagreement among investors about future bond yields. Notably, disagreement has substantial predictive power for yields, and BL's risk premiums are less volatile than those in the analogous model without learning. BL's forecasts are substantially more accurate than the consensus forecasts of market professionals, particularly following U.S. recessions. The predictive power of disagreement is distinct from the (much weaker) one of inflation and output growth. Rather, it appears to reflect uncertainty about future fiscal policy.

We examine abnormal returns and trading activity in bond markets around earnings announcements. Previous work provides mixed evidence on the relative impact of positive and negative surprises and the degree of response in investment-grade and speculative-grade bonds. We find that these announcements convey value-relevant information for both positive and negative earnings surprises in both investment and speculative-grade bonds. We also document significant heterogeneity in the response across industries, with muted responses in both abnormal returns and trading activity for bonds of firms in the financial and utilities industries.

Using hand‐collected data on the level of pension‐related mandatory disclosures required by International Accounting Standard 19 Employee Benefits , we test whether compliance levels with these disclosures convey information that affects firms’ access to the public instead of the private debt market, as well as the cost of their new debt issues. We document a higher tendency to access the public debt market for firms with higher levels of pension‐related disclosure. Furthermore, we find that firms with higher levels of pension‐related disclosure enjoy a lower cost in terms of issuance of public debt, but not a lower cost for private debt issues. Thus, the benefits of disclosure in reducing information risk are only realisable when creditors rely heavily on financial statements in their decision making, due to the limited access to private information. Additional tests reveal that high compliance levels effectively mitigate the negative effect of pension deficits on the cost of public debt. These findings provide novel evidence in the extant literature on the role of mandatory (and, in particular, pension‐related) disclosures on firms’ debt financing. They also have important policy implications.

We analyze the predictive power of several macroeconomic and financial indicators in forecasting quarterly realized betas of 30 industry and 25 size and book‐to‐market portfolios. We model realized betas as autoregressive processes of order 1 and include lagged values of macroeconomic and financial indicators as exogenous predictor variables. In out‐of‐sample forecasting exercises, forecasts using bond market variables as exogenous predictors statistically outperform forecasts from a benchmark model without any exogenous predictors. These forecasts based on bond market variables also economically outperform benchmark forecasts by providing better performance in hedging the market risk of portfolios.

Motivated by a seemingly persistent 'twin‐high' phenomenon in Latin America, we present a novel theoretical framework that has linkages between three institutions (education, criminal justice, and credit) to study policy‐pertinent research questions with regards to whether police spending has the potential to serve as an unconventional policy tool for macroeconomic management. Based on a stylized parameterization, we find formal and illegal human capital to share common cyclical properties, which can be "decoupled".under a rule‐based regime to police spending. This nonetheless comes at a cost of a greater propagation of the credit friction‐induced financial accelerator effect.

Credit reports are used in nearly all consumer lending decisions and, increasingly, in hiring decisions in the labor market, but the impact of a bad credit report is largely unknown. We study the effects of credit reports on financial and labor market outcomes using a difference-in-differences research design that compares changes in outcomes over time for Chapter 13 filers, whose personal bankruptcy flags are removed from credit reports after 7 years, to changes for Chapter 7 filers, whose personal bankruptcy flags are removed from credit reports after 10 years. Using credit bureau data, we show that the removal of a Chapter 13 bankruptcy flag leads to a large increase in credit scores, and an economically significant increase in credit card balances and mortgage borrowing. We study labor market effects using administrative tax records linked to personal bankruptcy records. In sharp contrast to the credit market effects, we estimate a precise zero effect of flag removal on employment and earnings outcomes. We conclude that credit reports are important for credit market outcomes, where they are the primary source of information used to screen applicants, but are of limited consequence for labor market outcomes, where employers rely on a much broader set of screening mechanisms.

Using local projection and event studies, this paper investigates the nonlinear effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks on financial‐asset prices in 10 advanced economies from 1990 to 2014. The international asset prices show evidence of the asymmetric or state‐dependent propagation of U.S. monetary shocks. Moreover, the results indicate that the nature of the nonlinearity in the propagation of the shocks differs across two asset classes, bond yields, and equity prices. Contractionary U.S. monetary policy shocks are quite influential in sovereign bond markets, while their impacts are largely insignificant in stock markets; the opposite is true for expansionary monetary policy shocks. These results are typical across open economies and suggest that U.S. monetary announcements and the subsequent reactions of international risk premiums may play a critical role in international shock propagation.

In this paper, we compare three different models, namely the Nelson- Siegel model, the Svensson model and the Diebold- Li model, for the estimation of an intraday yield curve on the Italian interbank credit market e-MID. Using a sample which spans from October 2005 until March 2010, the first important finding is that all three models are highly suitable for the estimation of an intraday yield curve providing superior empirical results when compared with similar works on e-MID. The second important finding is that, based on different in sample statistics, the Svensson model dominates the other two models before, during and after the financial crisis from 2007. Moreover, the Nelson- Siegel model seems to dominate the Diebold- Li model although these differences in goodness-of-fit between these two models may not be statistically significant.

We compare news in Twitter with traditional news outlets and emphasize their differential impact on Eurozone's sovereign bond market. We reveal a two‐way information flow between Twitter's “Grexit” tweets and “Grexit” mentions in traditional news which suggests not only that both types of news serve as important empirical predictors for the sovereign bond market but also that the “old” (traditional news) and the “new” (Twitter) media are connected; however, the influence of Twitter on traditional news is stronger. Grexit tweets raise the Greek spread more than Grexit mentions in traditional news. Weak contagion effects are reported for Portugal and Ireland.

This study investigates how companies adjusted their investments in key strategic resources—i.e., their workforce, capital expenditures, R&D, and CSR—in response to the sharp increase in the cost of credit (the “credit crunch”) during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. We compare companies whose long-term debt matured shortly before versus after the credit crunch to obtain (quasi-)random variation in the extent to which companies were hit by the higher borrowing costs. We find that companies that were adversely affected followed a “two-pronged” approach of curtailing their workforce and capital expenditures, while maintaining their investments in R&D and CSR. We further document that firms that followed this two-pronged approach performed better post-crisis.

The Australian economy experienced very frequent and sizeable terms of trade shocks. These shocks at times were more pronounced than commodity exporting developing countries and disproportionately benefited the extreme top end of income distribution. Did they derail overall economic progress? Circumstantial evidence suggests that they did not, but hard econometric evidence appears to be rare. In this paper, I revisit the Australian resource curse question from a long-run perspective. Using time series data on commodity prices, real GDP, real wages, non-farm GDP, manufacturing share of GDP, and manufacturing share of employment covering the period 1900 to 2007, I find very little evidence of a resource curse. Commodity booms in general and positive agricultural price shocks in particular appear to have impacted the rest of the economy positively both in short- and long-run. The positive effect is primarily led by expansion in manufacturing. This is perhaps reflective of trade protection, labour and credit market flexibility, and relatively open skilled migration in Australia especially during the post-war period.

In these excerpts from their recently published collection of Alexander Hamilton's writings on “Finance, Credit, and Debt,” the authors provide an overview of “the neatest, quickest financial revolution in history”—the one that took place in the United States during the six‐year tenure of its first Treasury Secretary. Between Hamilton's appointment by Washington in September 1789 and his resignation in February 1795, and as foreshadowed in letters that Hamilton was writing as early as 1780 (as a 23‐year‐old colonel in the Revolutionary army), the new nation saw the emergence of virtually all of what the authors identify as the six key components of modern financial systems. The financial revolution that produced the American financial system was accomplished through the following six developments: The establishment of effective institutions of public finance, including a well‐functioning Treasury debt market, that would enable the government to fund its operations, to restructure its then massive unpaid debts (much of it owed to foreigners), and, perhaps most important, to establish the public credit that would enable it to borrow ever larger amounts on favorable terms. The founding, in 1791, of a central bank to aid and oversee the government's finances and serve as the main supervisor and coordinator of the country's emergent banking and financial systems. By 1795, the Bank of the United States had five offices in different states and thus the beginnings of a national branch banking system. The creation, in 1791, of the U.S. dollar as the country's first national currency. With gold and silver as the monetary base into which bank notes and deposits were convertible, the dollar was endowed with the stability of value that would make it a sound basis for long‐term contracts (such as bonds) as well as a safe asset in which to hold savings. By 1795, all the states, which had earlier issued their own notes and currency, had become members of the national currency union. The development of a private banking system by encouraging state governments to charter banks to support their own finances and lend to businesses and individual entrepreneurs. By 1795, the three state‐chartered U.S. banks that existed in 1789 had become 20, providing the beginnings, with the five offices of the central bank, of what would become a vibrant (if crisis‐prone) American banking system. The establishment of securities markets designed to make financial assets—both government and private‐sector bonds, and equities (including stock in the Bank of the United States)—liquid and transferrable. By 1795, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston all had established organized exchanges for trading national as well as local bonds and, in some cases, stocks. The growth of business corporations, financial (such as banks and insurance companies) as well as industrial (utilities, manufacturers, and road, bridge, and canal companies), thereby encouraging the pooling of individuals’ capital that would allow the creation of larger enterprises that could realize economies of scale. Thanks to these six developments, the United States was transformed from a bankrupt and severely divided nation in 1789 with huge debts to overseas creditors to a country whose government in 1795 produced a large budget surplus and whose securities were viewed by foreigners as among the most creditworthy in the world. And that was important since, as Hamilton clearly foresaw from the start, the U.S. government would have to rely heavily on overseas capital to fund its operations.

This paper studies systemic risk in the Chinese debt market stemming from inter‐corporate loan guarantees using field data from Zhejiang Province. We apply a weighted and directed network model to analyse the implications for default contagion and systemic risk under different stress testing scenarios. The empirical results indicate that the topology of the loan guarantee network is close to a ‘scale‐free’ structure, which is known to be robust against accidental failures but vulnerable to coordinated attacks. Hence, the network is able to cope with idiosyncratic shocks resulting from single company failures, but can easily suffer from more widespread contagion if a group of systemically important companies are hit by a targeted shock. We further demonstrate that within our sample of small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) companies, increasing leverage reduces network stability and exacerbates the effects of contagion. More lenient bank lending policies increase the survival rate of sample companies and thereby reduce the losses from default contagion.

This paper uses high-frequency financial data to analyze the effects of US monetary policy—during the conventional and unconventional policy regimes—on international bonds markets. We focus on yields of dollar-denominated sovereign bonds issued by more than 90 countries since the early 1990s, which allows us to abstract from the policy-induced movements in exchange rates that otherwise confound the response of yields on foreign bonds denominated in local currencies. Our results show that yields on dollar-denominated sovereign debt are highly responsive to unanticipated changes in the stance of US monetary policy during both the conventional and unconventional policy regimes, and that the passthrough of unconventional policy actions to foreign bond yields is, on balance, comparable to that of conventional policy actions. In addition, a conventional US monetary easing leads to a significant narrowing of credit spreads on sovereign bonds issued by countries with a speculative-grade credit rating. During the unconventional policy regime, however, yields on speculative-grade sovereign debt move one-to-one with policy-induced fluctuations in yields on comparable US Treasuries. We also examine whether the response of sovereign credit spreads to US monetary policy differs between policy easings and policy tightenings and find no evidence of such asymmetry. This finding casts doubt on the notion that US monetary easings induce excessive risk-taking in international bond markets.

Using the staggered deregulation of the U.S. banking industry as a series of exogenous shocks, I study the effect of the credit supply on the speed of capital structure adjustment. I find robust evidence that interstate and intrastate banking deregulation are positively associated with leverage adjustments. Specifically, the speeds of adjustment to target leverage are faster in the post-deregulation periods. I also find that the positive effect is driven by firms that are financially constrained, are financially dependent on banks, and have less access to the public debt market and by deregulated banks’ ability to geographically diversify the credit risk.

This paper identifies seasonal firms and their peak seasons to provide empirical evidence of the approach these firms take to finance seasonal operations. The seasonal use of funds, which builds before seasonal revenue, is largely financed with transitory sources of credit, such as credit lines, trade credit, and commercial paper. Permanent financing is used only moderately to meet seasonal needs. However, both weak credit market conditions and firm‐level financial constraints limit the ability of seasonal firms to use debt as transitory financing. These frictions result in a partial shift to permanent financing but reduce the seasonal use of funds overall.

Research Question/Issue. This paper studies the effect of top management team (TMT) network centrality on corporate bond yield spreads. In additional analyses, we examine the hierarchical structures of TMT and study which parts contribute to the decrease in bond yield spreads. We also examine the mediating roles (including informed trading probability, media coverage, political ties, financial ties, and bond ratings) and the moderating roles (including marketization and analysts following) in the correlation between TMT network centrality and corporate bond yield spreads. Research Findings/Insights. This paper finds that firms with high TMT network centrality are significantly negatively correlated with lower bond yield spreads. The findings are robust after controlling for a series of sensitivity checks and endogenous concerns. The results of the hierarchical structures show that the decrease of bond spreads is accounted for CFOs' networks and board members' networks, whereas the role of CEOs' networks is not apparent. More importantly, after controlling CEOs' networks, CFOs' networks, and board members' networks, the centrality of all TMT members' networks remains statistically significant, indicating that firms can benefit from the interlocking of all TMT members (not just the senior members). From the mediating effect results, we find that high TMT network centrality increases the value of a firm's probability of informed trading and its bond ratings while also increasing a firm's access to media coverage, political ties, and financial ties, which in turn can help lower bondholder' risk premiums. The moderating effect results show that the higher the marketization index and the more analysts following a firm, the higher the benefit of TMT network centrality to bond spreads. Theoretical/Academic Implications. The results provide strong evidence that bondholders require lower bond yield spreads for firms with higher TMT network centrality, which suggests that TMT network centrality is critically essential for firms to obtain resources and to build a good corporate image and reputation; TMT network centrality can also lead to better information flow. Practitioner/Policy Implications. This paper can inform various stakeholders about the impact of high TMT network centrality on bond yield spreads. It would be helpful to ensure the reasonable pricing of corporate bonds and to promote healthy and sound development of the bond market.

Private placements continue to be issued in the municipal debt market and remain a topic of interest for municipalities, investors, and regulators. Private placements are often sold without an underwriter to relatively sophisticated investors and are typically “buy‐to‐hold” transactions. Therefore, compared with traditional competitive or negotiated sales, there are fewer financial intermediaries and fewer regulatory disclosure requirements that accompany private placements. Savings on “flotation” costs can be substantial enough to make private placements a less costly method of debt offering. Conditional on selectivity in the method of sale and key market covariates, private placements offer lower arbitrage yields and issuance costs compared to both competitive and negotiated debt offerings.

In this paper, we empirically investigate how greenness information is priced in the green bond market. Our comparison of liquidity‐adjusted yield premiums of green bonds versus synthetic conventional bonds indicates that, on average, there is no robust and significant yield premium or discount on green bonds. However, green bonds certified by an external reviewer enjoy a discount of about 6 bps. Furthermore, green bonds that obtain a Climate Bonds Initiative certificate show a discount of around 15 bps. The findings suggest that a universally accepted greenness measure can benefit the development of the green bond market.

We explore the consequences of international trade in an economy that encompasses technology choice and an endogenous distribution of mark-ups due to credit market frictions. We show that in such an environment a gradual opening of trade may -- but not necessarily must -- have a negative impact on productivity and overall output. The reason is that the pro-competitive effects of trade reduce mark-ups and hence make access to credit more difficult for smaller firms. As a result, smaller firms -- while not driven out of the market -- may be forced to switch to less productive technologies.