Publications by PSE researchers

This paper contributes to the literature on firms’ export pricing by assessing whether and to what extent firms take into account the expected future evolution of the exchange rates while setting their prices. Using French micro-level trade data, our empirical analysis reveals that by adjusting their export prices, firms partly absorb information about future exchange rate variations. The extent to which individual exporters absorb future exchange rate fluctuations is found to depend on their market power, in accordance with theoretical dynamic demand-side models encompassing mechanisms creating an inter-temporal relationship between current market shares and future profits. The analysis also shows that the strength of such expectation-related mechanism is considerably reduced with greater future exchange rate uncertainty, in line with an interpretation of pricing-to-market as an investment decision under uncertainty. In a comparative perspective our results are shown to drive asymmetric responses across destinations of aggregate bilateral export flows to expected exchange rate movements.

We propose an aggregate growth index that explicitly accounts for fat tails in the firm size distribution and for the negative scaling relation between the size of the firm and the volatility of its growth rates. Using Compustat data on US publicly traded company, we show that the new index tracks aggregate fluctuations much better than simpler measures of central tendency of the dynamics of firms, like the growth rates sample average, confirming that the statistical properties characterizing the micro-economic dynamics of firms are relevant for the dynamics of the aggregate. To better characterize the origins of aggregate fluctuations, we decompose the index in two parts, describing, respectively, the modal (typical) value of log growth rates and the tilt (asymmetry) of their distribution. Regression analysis shows that models based on this decomposition, despite their simplicity, possess a remarkable explanatory and predictive power with respect to the aggregate growth.

This paper provides a systematic cross-country investigation of the relation between a firm’s growth volatility and its size. For the first time the analysis is carried out using comparable and representative sets of data sourced by official business registers of an important number of countries. We show that there exists a robust negative relation between growth volatility and size with an average elasticity equal to . We check the robustness of this result against a number of potential sources of bias and in particular with respect to sectoral disaggregation and against the inclusion of firm age. Our result is consistent with the idea that independently from specific country characteristics there exists a common underlying mechanism driving the elasticity between size and growth volatility. We then propose two mechanisms able to explain our result and we conclude discussing its relevance with respect to the recent literature on granularity.

The paper provides an original empirical approach to investigate multi-product firms’ export patterns across destinations by considering the whole mix of products exported by a firm, formally defined as a product-vector. The proposed methodology allows to take into account a firm’s choice of both exporting and non-exporting a product to a destination and to consider different forms of product complementarity that can generate product combinations. The empirical analysis uses a panel of transactions level data for the universe of Italian and French firms and complements the existing evidence along a few dimensions. First, we show that there is a high level of sparsity: selection of products at destination is indeed very severe. Second, we document that firms export several different combinations of product vectors across markets. Relatedly a high level of diversity is detected also when considering the intensive margin, pointing to a substantial departure from a stable global product hierarchy. Finally, we provide evidence that at the same time there exists a stable component in firms’ product vectors across destinations composed by products which are not necessarily the most important in terms of sales, suggesting rich form of complementarities across goods. Products belonging to this stable component are less likely to be discarded as a consequence of an exogenous shock such as the dismantling of the MFA quotas after accession of China to the WTO.

Exploiting data on the product-destination-level transactions of a large panel of Italian firms, we provide evidence that financial constraints affect price variation across exporters. Constrained exporters charge higher prices than do unconstrained firms that export to the same product-destination market. This pattern is the result of a two-fold effect. Distressed firms pass on their higher production costs through prices. However, they also charge higher mark-ups. We explain this evidence referring to models in which rival firms produce different brands of the same product for customers with significant switching costs and producers face capital market imperfections when they need external financing. Our empirical investigations corroborate this explanation: price gaps are higher when switching costs or other forms of demand rigidity are expected to be more relevant.

The article examines the causal effect of financial constraints on firms' exports. We exploit a firm-level proxy of constraints based on credit ratings and available for a large panel of Italian exporting and non-exporting firms. Our estimation strategy allows to cure for self-selection into exports and endogeneity of financial constraints. At the same time, we can control for unobserved firm fixed effects both in the selection and in the export equation, thus identifying the effect on exports of within-firm changes in financial constraints status. We find that financial constraints produce a sizable reduction in the value of a firm's foreign sales.

Combining detailed data on export transactions and an informative firm-level measure of financing constraints, this article provides new evidence on the extent and dynamics of product and geographical diversification of constrained exporters. Financial constraints associate with: (i) narrower product/destination margins, (ii) higher probability to drop products and destinations, (iii) larger loss of export value associated to dropping product or destination markets, (iv) higher probability to discard products with relatively large share in firm total export values, and (v) larger likelihood to drop country markets that are bigger, richer, geographically closer and with a relatively larger share in total firm export value.

This study analyzes the effect of financial constraints (FCs) on firm dynamics. We measure FCs with an official credit rating, which captures availability and cost of external resources. We find that FCs undermine average firm growth, induce anti-correlation in growth patterns, and reduce the dependence of growth volatility on size. FCs are also associated with higher volatility and asymmetries in growth shock distributions, preventing young fast-growing firms especially from seizing attractive growth opportunities and further deteriorating the growth prospects of already slow-growing firms, particularly if old. The sub-diffusive nature of the growth process of constrained firms is compatible with the distinctive properties of their size distribution.

Contemporary economic analysis is largely subject to rather bizarre schizofrenic syndromes. On the one hand, over the last thirty years or so, macro theories have tried to squeeze the interpretation of whatever aggregate dynamics down to some sort of decision-theoretic framework in which the increasingly mythical ''representative agent'' was doing all the action. Whatever statistical properties of the time-series, being it productivity and GDP growth, fluctuations, employment, investment, had to be explained as the equilibrium outcome of some sophisticated inter-temporal maximization exercise by such an agent. Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models are the dominant genre in this spirit. On the micro side largely the opposite has happened. Empirical analyses drawing upon an increasing ensemble of micro longitudinal datasets have powerfully highlighted the ubiquitous, large and persistent heterogeneity in all dimensions of business firms' characteristics and dynamics one cared to look at.