This paper provides evidence that credit constraints are an important determinant of international trade flows. I exploit shocks to the availability of external finance and examine the impact of equity market liberalizations on the export behavior of 91 countries in the 1980-1997 period. I show that liberalizations increase exports disproportionately more in financially vulnerable sectors that require more outside finance or employ fewer collateralizable assets. This result is not driven by cross-country differences in factor endowments and is independent of simultaneous trade policy reforms. Moreover, it obtains with equal strength in the full panel of countries as well as in both panel and event-study analyses of countries which removed capital controls during the sample period. Finally, the effects of liberalizations are more pronounced in economies with initially less active stock markets, indicating that foreign equity flows may substitute for an underdeveloped domestic financial system. Similarly, opening equity markets has a greater impact in the presence of higher trade costs caused by restrictive trade policies.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 76 (2008) Issue (Month): 1 (September) Pages: 33-47 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Heidi Boesdal).
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Matilde Bombardini & Giovanni Gallipoli & Germán Pupato, 2009.
"Skill Dispersion and Trade Flows,"
NBER Working Papers
15097, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions: