Financial constraints and export performance: Evidence from Brazilian micro-data

Fatma Bouattour (1)

1 LEDa - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dauphine

Despite the growing role of Brazil in international trade, exports still face challenges. Following the theoretical framework of Manova (2013), this paper provides firm-level evidence that financial constraints hamper the export performances. Using customs data from Brazil, I show through a probability model, that Large firms exhibit more probability to have export performances when compared with Small and Medium-sized firms, and that this advantage tends to decrease in industries with high external funding needs. The sectors financial vulnerability is proxied with two measures borrowed from Rajan and Zingales (1998) and computed for Brazilian industries over the recent period of the 2000s. The results are globally robust to the modification of the proxies of sectoral external finance dependence, used in the literature. Other tests demonstrate that Brazilian subsidiaries have greater chances to be export performant, and that there is a "regional effect" that makes some Brazilian regions export more than others. This paper also provides an insight of the effects of the global crisis of 2008 on the export patterns.

Mots clés: Export; firms; international trade

Domaines: Économie et finance quantitative [q-fin]; Finance [q-fin.GN]

Fatma Bouattour. Financial constraints and export performance: Evidence from Brazilian micro-data. AFSE 2015 64th Congress, Jun 2015, Rennes, France. pp.33. ⟨hal-01267726⟩