This study finds that even small unexpected supply shocks propagate downstream through production networks and are amplified by firms with short-term financial constraints. The unexpected 2011 increase in the tax on imports purchased with foreign-sourced trade credit is examined using data capturing almost all Turkish supplier-customer links. The identification strategy exploits the heterogeneous impact of the shock on importers. The results indicate that this small shock had a non-trivial economic impact on exposed firms and propagated downstream through affected suppliers. Empirical tests, motivated by a simple theory, demonstrate that low-liquidity firms amplified its transmission.

We find that changes in banks' risk-based capital requirements can affect firm-level exports. We exploit the mandatory Basel II adoption in its Standardized Approach by all banks in Turkey on July 1, 2012. This change affects risk-weights for letters of credit and generates two identification schemes with opposite predicted signs. Using data that cover 16,662 exporters shipping 2,888 different products to 158 countries, we find that the share of letter of credit-based exports decreases (increases) at the firm-country-product level when the associated counterparty risk-weights increase (decrease) after Basel II adoption. However, growth of firm-product-country level exports remains unaffected.

How do crises affect Central clearing Counterparties (CCPs)? We focus on CCPs that clear and guarantee a large and safe segment of the repo market during the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis. We start by developing a simple framework to infer CCP stress, which can be measured through the sensitivity of repo rates to sovereign CDS spreads. Such sensitivity jointly captures three effects: (1) the effectiveness of the haircut policy, (2) CCP member default risk (conditional on sovereign default) and (3) CCP default risk (conditional on both sovereign and CCP member default). The data show that, during the sovereign debt crisis of 2011, repo rates strongly respond to movements in sovereign risk, in particular for GIIPS countries, indicating significant CCP stress. Our model suggests that repo investors behaved as if the conditional probability of CCP default was very large.