Abstract

This paper examines trade credit and bank credit behavior of firms during financial crisis using World Bank Survey dataset that contains detailed data on trade credit utilization of firms. Unlike literature, cluster analysis is used in order to investigate credit behavior of firms during financial crisis. For better clustering results, feature selection method is used to select variables thought to be important on model. When examined the trade and bank credit behavior of clusters that have been formed by using these variables with clustering analysis, it has been found that impact of the crisis on firms in the supply chain is important. It is found that due to demand fall for goods generated by crisis, firms are motivated to give trade credits to their customers in order not to lose them. However, firms need financial support either from the previous link in the supply chain through trade credit or from the financial institutions through bank credit.

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