Patrick Musso

Financial Constraints and Firm Export Behavior

The paper analyzes the link between financial constraints and firm export behavior. Our main finding is that firms enjoying better financial health are more likely to become exporters. The result contrasts with the previous empirical literature which found evidence that export participation improves firm financial health, but not that export starters display any ex-ante financial advantage. On the contrary, we find that financial constraints act as a barrier to export participation. Better access to external financial resources increases the probability to start exporting and also shortens the time before firms decide to serve foreign customers. This finding has important policy implications as it suggests that, in presence of financial markets imperfections, public intervention can be called for to help eficient but financially constrained firms to overcome the sunk entry costs into export markets and expand their activities abroad.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Productivity Slowdown and Resurgence. The Role of Capital Obsolescence

In a recent work, Karl Whelan [2003] argues that the hypothesis of balanced growth is firmly rejected by postwar u.s. data. There is some clear evidence that the ratio of real investment to real consumption has exhibited an upward trend since the late 1950s. In this case, the traditional one-sector model of economic growth provides a poor description of the long-run behavior of the u.s. economy. In this paper, I develop a simple two-sector model of economic growth in which the obsolescence of capital goods is endogenous. Numerical simulations of unbalanced growth paths suggest that the rapid decline in the relative price of equipment goods observed since the mid-1960s in the u.s. has shortened the average service-life of equipment, which, in turn, induced a long-lasting underestimation of the growth rate of Total Factor Productivity.

Competition, Innovation And Increasing Returns ∗

When firms enjoy increasing returns in presence of a high rate of innovation, competition may obtain due to the continuous changes in demand and cost conditions even when there is no differentiation and the products of competing firms are essentially homogeneous. In this paper we intend to provide theoretical structure to this conjecture, and to confirm it by carrying out a simulation analysis in the case of two firms competing on the market.