Limited Enforceable International Loans, International Risk Sharing and Trade

This paper analyzes the impact of limited enforceable international loanson international risk sharing and trade fluctuations in a two-country two-good endowment economy. Our specification of the punishment threat allowsthe exclusion from trade to last only finitely many periods and distinguishesbetween financial autarky and full autarky. Quantitative results show thatlimited enforceability substantially alters cross-country consumption correlations and the dynamics of net exports. In contrast to existing studies, risk sharing is low for large elasticities of substitution between the domestic and foreign goods. However, it remains challenging to explain the high volatility of the terms of trade empirically observed.