Export credit guarantees and export performance: An empirical analysis for Germany

Recent literature finds that exporters are particularly vulnerable to financial market frictions. As a consequence, exports may be lower than their efficient levels. For this reason, many countries support exporters by underwriting export credit guarantees. The empirical evidence on the effects of those policies is, however, very limited. In this paper, we use sectoral data on export credit guarantees issued by the German government. We investigate whether those guarantees indeed do increase exports and whether they remedy the export-restricting effect of credit market imperfections both on the sectoral and on the export-market levels. Exploiting the sectoral structure of a rich three-way panel data set of German exports, we control for unobserved heterogeneity on the country-year, sector-year and country-sector dimensions. We document a robust export-increasing effect of guarantees. There is some evidence that the effect is larger for export markets with poor financial institutions and in sectors that rely more on external finance.