R&D investments, financing constraints, exporting and productivity

This paper adds new empirical evidence on the mutual relationships between credit constraints, total factor productivity, Research and Development investments and exporting, by jointly considering them in a simultaneous equation framework. Our empirical analysis focuses on a large sample of manufacturing firms from France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Our results confirm the well-known mutual positive correlation among exporting, R&D and firm's productivity. They also show the existence of a mutual relationship between exporting, productivity and credit constraints: exporters and high productivity firms are less likely to be credit constrained, while better access to credit is associated to larger productivity and a higher probability of exporting. By contrast, we find no significant relation between investing in R&D and the probability to be credit constrained, conditional on exporting. This suggests that efficiency-improving strategies, mediated by the existence of credit constraints, are at the core of firm growth achieved through exporting and innovation.