Investigating the Role of Contract Enforcement and Financial Costs on the Payment Choice: Industry-Level Evidence from Turkey

This paper examines the effect of legal and financial conditions on the payment contract choice by empirically testing the predictions of Schmidt-Eisenlohr’s (2013) model with actual bilateral industry level trade finance data (at 2-digit level) from Turkey. Our results show that an improvement in contract enforcement and an increase in the financing cost in the importing country (exporting country) increases (decreases) the share of post-shipment sales. For the share of pre-payment sales, the opposite effects are estimated. Finally we find that share of post-shipment sales (pre-payment sales) increases (decreases) in the number of products traded between partners in the past.