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 appropriate wealth categories, rather than arbitrarily selecting firms likely to be credit rationed. The data support the main predictions of Burkart and Ellingsen's model quite well. The author finds that medium-wealth firms substitute trade credit for bank credit consistent with using it to alleviate bank credit rationing. The low-wealth firms use trade credit, but it is positively linked to their bank credit, which suggests that those firms are constrained in both bank credit and trade credit markets, and so cannot use trade credit to adjust as much to negative shocks. The findings also suggest that there are very few unconstrained, high-wealth Canadian firms. The author also finds that low-wealth, declining, and distressed firms supply proportionally more trade credit than firms that have healthier balance sheets. This is surprising, but has been found in earlier studies as well. It may reflect some exploitation of market power by the customers of such firms.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Bank of Canada in its series Working Papers with number
04-49.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)