Resumen de Financial constraints and firm behavior in international markets: : an introduction to the special section
Since the seminal paper by Greenaway et al. (2007), a large body of literature has flourished that investigates the firm-level relationship between finance and export or, more generally, between finance and the international dimension of a firm�s activities.
The contingent reasons for such an interest are easy to guess: the prolonged recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis has urged many advanced economies to look at exports as a way to sustain economic activity in the face of weak internal demand. At the same time, the drying up of credit that has resulted from the troubles of many financial institutions has made it all the more difficult for firms to finance their operations, let alone engage in the investments needed to start operating in foreign markets. In fact, one stream of this literature aims precisely at identifying the role of finance in explaining the so-called �great trade collapse�, i.e. the more than proportional decline in international trade relative to output in the aftermath of the crisis (see, among others, Raddatz, 2010; Ahn et al., 2011; Del Prete and Federico, 2014, for empirical investigations; Felbermayr and Spiegel, 2014 offer instead a possible theoretical explanation).
A deeper and theoretically grounded reason has to do with the acknowledgement of ubiquitous, large, and persistent heterogeneity among firms, even within narrowly defined industries. The magnitudes are striking. Syverson (2011) reports that, on average, plants belonging to the 90th percentile of productivity distribution are almost twice as productive as plants in the 10th percentile: this occurs within four-digit manufacturing industries in the United States; Hsieh and Klenow (2009) find even larger variations (5:1) in China and India.
This feature�massively documented in the past decade as access to micro data has been made easier�has shaped research agendas in several fields of economics. �
