主讲人：彭聪，北京大学国家发展研究院

题目：Covered to Compete: How Export Credit Insurance Shapes Firm Trade

参与老师：余昌华、薛思帆

时间：2026年9月15日（周二）上午10:30-12:00（北京时间）

地点：承泽园245教室

摘要：

Export credit insurance transfers the risk that a foreign buyer fails to pay from the exporter to a public insurer, a margin distinct from the credit-side frictions that most trade-finance research emphasizes. We estimate the causal effect of short-term export credit insurance (ECI) on firm exports using application-level records from China's export credit agency merged with customs and tax data. Identification exploits quasi-random variation in ECI approval created by buyer-level credit ceilings and a first-come, first-served allocation rule, combined with propensity score matching and two-stage least squares. Among matched applicants, approval raises a firm's exports to a destination by about 53 percent. Scaled by the induced change in coverage, a 10 percent increase in insured coverage corresponds to roughly 2.5 percent higher firm-destination exports. A placebo on destinations where the firm never applied returns a tight null, which supports the identifying assumption. ECI expands both the intensive and extensive margins of trade while leaving unit values unchanged, and the effects are largest for private firms, financially constrained exporters, and smaller firms. Balance-sheet evidence points to two channels, as insured receivables become more pledgeable and buyer payment risk is mitigated. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the program can be fiscally self-financing across a plausible range of parameters. The findings indicate that public export insurance can be a cost-effective instrument for supporting export-led growth in developing economies.

主讲人介绍：

Cong Peng is an assistant professor at the National School of Development and the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development, Peking University. His research is in urban, trade, and environmental economics and in AI for Social Science, with a focus on developing countries. His recent work asks whether public investment delivers what it is meant to, covering national road programs, informal settlement upgrading, and export credit insurance, among others. He works closely with policy institutions, on projects funded by the International Growth Centre and the Swiss National Science Foundation, and in ongoing collaborations with the research departments of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the World Bank. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of California San Diego.