Firms' Leverage and Export Quality: Evidence from France

Michele Bernini, Sarah Guillou and Flora Bellone ()

No 2013-29, GREDEG Working Papers from Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France

Abstract: Is corporate financial structure a determinant of non-price competitiveness in export markets? In this paper we provide a positive answer to this question by finding that among illiquid exporters leverage is negatively correlated with the quality of their exported goods. This result is obtained on a sample including over 120,000 export flows of 6,229 French firms exporting within six HS6 products categories. The main methodological contribution of our study is the use of a flow-level measure of export quality obtained from the estimation of a structural model of demand (Berry, 1994); this estimator enhances the validity of our approach by avoiding the drawbacks of proxying for quality using export prices, as it is common practice in the trade literature. We argue that the negative impact of leverage on quality is consistent with theoretical contributions in the financial literature predicting that debt financing hampers the incentive to undertake quality upgrading investments.

Keywords: Export; output quality; leverage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 D22 F14 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published in Journal of Banking and Finance, 2015, vol. 59, pp. 280-296.

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Related works:
Working Paper: Firms leverage and export quality:evidence from France (2013)
Working Paper: Firms leverage and export quality evidence from France (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gre:wpaper:2013-29

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