- Home
- Publications
- Firms’ Leverage And Export Quality: Evidence From France
Firms’ Leverage and Export Quality: Evidence from France


Authors
External Authors

Guillou, S

Bellone, F
Related Themes
Productivity, Trade, and Regional EconomiesJEL Code
G11, G32, F14, L11
Journal
Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 59, Pages: 280-296
Publisher
Elsevier, Oxford
External Resources
Issue
October 2015
Does corporate financial structure matter for a firm’s ability to compete in international markets through output quality? This study answers this question by using firm-level export and balance sheet data covering a large sample of French manufacturing exporters over the period 1997–2007. The main result is that there is a negative causal relation between a firm’s leverage and export quality, where quality is inferred from the estimation of a discrete choice model of foreign consumers’ demand. This result is robust across different specifications and estimation techniques. In addition, by estimating investment models we find that the negative impact of leverage on quality is consistent with theories predicting that the agency cost of debt determines suboptimal investment.
Related Blog Posts


Regenerating the UK Regions – Insights from New Economic Geography
Arnab Bhattacharjee
Adrian Pabst
6 min read

What Next for UK Industrial Policy and Productivity?
Konstantinos Myrodias
Adrian Pabst
4 min read

Related Projects
Related News
Related Publications
Econometric Analysis of the Determinants of Bank Profitability in Three Major African Counties: Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa
30 Mar 2022
Discussion Papers
Related events

Productivity Commission Evidence Session: What and How Can Productivity Be Improved?

Productivity Commission Evidence Session on International Best Practice

Productivity after Covid-19
Workshop on Productivity and Structural Change

2021 Prais Lecture: State Capacity and Economic Growth: Cautionary Tales
Sizing the Productivity Problem: an evidence session from the Productivity Commission

