Firm Exports, Foreign Ownership, and the Global Financial Crisis

This paper shows theoretically and empirically how access to finance explains the exceptional export performance of foreign-owned firms. We build a model of heterogeneous exporters in which foreign-owned firms can access foreign capital markets via their multinational parents. The model predicts that foreign ownership makes exports more resilient to deteriorating credit conditions. To empirically identify this effect, we estimate a triple differences model using rich micro data from Spain and exploiting the global financial crisis as an exogenous shock to credit supply. We find that foreign ownership significantly stabilized firm exports in the crisis, in particular among financially vulnerable firms.