This paper investigates the relationship between bank credit and exports of services by Italian firms. In order to identify the role of credit supply in services exports we use matched data on bank-firm relationships and the shocks affecting banks' funding during the sovereign debt crisis. The study suggests that credit supply shocks had a significant impact on services exports: a bank credit reduction of 1% led to a fall in exports of about 0.4%. These results hold even after controlling for alternative sources of firms' external finance, unobserved credit demand heterogeneity and a number of robustness checks.
The paper investigates the relationship between services trade performance and employment characteristics in Italian firms. Our analysis is at the micro level and descriptive in nature. We merge micro data on services trade transactions with employment and wage variables at the level of the firm. We find that firms engaged in services trade tend to employ a larger share of managers and white collars and to pay higher average wages. They also exhibit systematically smaller shares of blue collars in their employment structure. These patterns hold qualitatively across all main sectors of firms' affiliation and across sectors of traded services. We find a strong and positive association between services exports and/or imports and total employment. Regression analysis confirms this last finding and shows it is robust to controlling for various confounding heterogeneity.
This paper studies the effects of differences in local administrative burdens in Italy in the years 2005-2007 preceding a major reform that sped up firm registration procedures. Combining regulatory data from a survey on Italian provinces before the reform (costs and time to start a business) with industry-level entry rates of limited liability firms, I explore the effects of regulatory barriers on the average of the annual entry rates across industries with different natural propensities to enter the market. The estimates of the cross-sectional analysis show that lengthier and, to some extent, more costly procedures reduced entry in sectors with naturally high entry. A one-day delay in registration procedures reduces the entry rate in highly dynamic sectors by more than 1 percent. These results hold when I include measures of local financial development and of efficiency of bankruptcy procedures. JEL codes: G18, G38, L51, M13The importance of firm creation for the development of modern economic systems is widely acknowledged. Indeed, entry fosters competition, lowers prices, and promotes employment growth. 1 One of the main obstacles to firm creation is the burden of bureaucratic procedures. Costly regulation or burdensome legal procedures for firm creation hamper the creation of new corporations and economic growth. Since the works of De Soto (1989) and of Djankov et al. (2002), this issue has been widely reiterated by a growing and consolidated empirical literature that has drawn heavily on the international regulatory measures developed by the World Bank from 2004 onwards (World Bank).While the wide cross-country literature almost uniformly finds a negative impact of regulation on entry or on economic performance, the studies analyzing single countries do not get unambiguous results. In fact, while some papers show
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