Credit Constraints, Heterogeneous Firms and International Trade
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This article examined the detrimental consequences of financial market imperfections for international trade and developed a heterogeneous-firm model with countries at different levels of financial development and sectors of varying financial vulnerability.Abstract:
This paper examines the detrimental consequences of financial market imperfections for international trade. I develop a heterogeneous-firm model with countries at different levels of financial development and sectors of varying financial vulnerability. Applying this model to aggregate trade data, I study the mechanisms through which credit constraints operate. First, financial development increases countries' exports above and beyond its impact on overall production. Firm selection into exporting accounts for a third of the trade-specific effect, while two thirds are due to reductions in firm-level exports. Second, financially advanced economies export a wider range of products and their exports experience less product turnover. Finally, while all countries service large destinations, exporters with superior financial institutions have more trading partners and also enter smaller markets. All of these effects are magnified in financially vulnerable sectors. These results have important policy implications for less developed economies that rely on exports for economic growth but suffer from poor financial contractibility.read more
Figures
Table 10. Economic Significance: Predicted vs. Actual Trade Growth 
Table 9. Economic Significance: Comparative Statics 
Table 5. Financial Development and Firm-Level Exports 
Figure 3. The Productivity Cut-off for Exporting 
Table 5. Financial Development and Firm-Level Exports 
Table 1. Export Patterns in the Data
Citations
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References
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Financial and legal constraints to firm growth: does size matter?
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the effect of financial, legal, and corruption problems on firms' growth rates and find that it is consistently the smallest firms that are most constrained.