Financing constraints, firm dynamics, export decisions, and aggregate productivity

Andrea Caggese and Vicente Cuñat

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We develop a dynamic industry model where financing frictions affect the entry decisions of new firms in the home market, as well as the riskiness of operating firms. These two factors in turn determine a joint endogenous distribution of firms across productivity, volatility and financial wealth. We show that this endogenous distribution is crucial to understand export and productivity dynamics after a trade liberalization. In particular, the calibrated model predicts that financing frictions have an ambiguous effect on the number of firms starting to export. They reduce the ability of firms to finance the fixed costs necessary to start exporting, but they also change the distribution of domestic firms so that most of them find more profitable to access foreign markets. More importantly, the model predicts that financing constraints, even when they have a negligible net effect on the number of exporting firms, reduce the aggregate productivity gains induced by trade liberalization by 30% to 50%, because they distort the selection into export of the most productive firms. In the second part of the paper we verify the main predictions of the model with a rich dataset of Italian manufacturing firms for the period 1995-2003.

Keywords: Financing Constraints; Firm Dynamics; Exports; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E00 G00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2011-06-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/43160/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Financing Constraints, Firm Dynamics, Export Decisions, and Aggregate Productivity (2013)
Working Paper: Financing Constraints, Firm Dynamics, Export Decisions and Aggregate productivity (2011)
Working Paper: Financing Constraints, Firm Dynamics, Export Decisions, and Aggregate productivity (2011)
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