Notes

• [*]
  LAREFI-Université de Bordeaux, Campus de Pessac, Avenue Léon Duguit, 33608 Pessac cedex, 05 56 84 62 12, Anne-Gael. Vaubourg@u-bordeaux.fr
• [1]
  Nevertheless, the decline in merchandise export volumes was particularly severe in Japan (– 25 %). For additional details, see Tanaka [2009] and Wakasugi [2009].
• [2]
  While common practice, comparing GDP and exports (or imports) remains difficult since while the former is calculated from added values, the latter relates to total production.
• [3]
  It is true that there is still no consensus on the key role of finance in the world trade collapse. The literature examines other explanations such as the vertical specialization induced by globalization and multinational firms (Bems et al. [2009]; Yi [2003]) or the decline in demand due to depressed economic activity (Eaton et al. [2011]). Moreover, several opinion surveys conducted by the IMF and WTO reveal that credit shortage is considered by bankers and exporters as the second cause of the great trade collapse, after the decline in demand (Mora and Powers [2011]).
• [4]
  Financial constraints can also affect the quality of exported products. For theoretical and empirical investigations on this issue, see Fan et al. [2012].
• [5]
  In addition, once a firm is engaged in international trade, it is able to use the profits earned from its past exporting activity to finance the costs associated with new exporting destinations.
• [6]
  Financial development also has a positive impact on the ratio of manufactured imports to GDP but this impact is much smaller than the effect on the proxies for manufactured export.
• [7]
  The RZ indicator has been widely used in the literature. Based on the idea that the ranking of sectors according to the level of financial dependence is the same across countries, many papers apply the indicator calculated by Rajan and Zingales [1998] for the US to countries for which such data are not available.
• [8]
  We deal more deeply with the reverse causality issue in section 4.
• [9]
  These indicators are mainly inspired by the literature on “law and finance” (La Porta et al. [1998, 1999]).
• [10]
  As pointed out by Manova [2010], policies aiming to attract foreign financial flows (portfolio and direct investments) also mitigate firms’ financial constraint and enhance export performance.
• [11]
  The existence of a negative correlation between interbank lending rates and exports is also documented by Feng and Lin [2013].
• [12]
  This result is corroborated by Bricongne et al. [2010] using firm-level data for France over the period 2000-2009.
• [13]
  Berman [2009] demonstrates that financial vulnerability also exaggerates the effect of a currency crisis on exports. When exporting firms are indebted in foreign currency, a depreciation of the domestic currency increases the fixed cost of exports, thus reducing the number of exporting firms. This so-called balance-sheet effect is amplified when firms are financially constrained and have few tangible assets.
• [14]
  While the literature typically considers the leverage ratio as an indicator of firms’ vulnerability, Harris and Li [2011] interpret it as an indicator of financial health because its measures the firm’s ability to raise long term funds at a low tax cost, relative to equities. They find that having a high ratio of long-term debt to total assets significantly reduces the likelihood that the firm will cease exporting.
• [15]
  However, the role of the legal environment becomes less important when the importer and the exporter have developed a close relationship (Antràs and Foley [2015]).