The great trade collapse and the Spanish export miracle: Firm‐level evidence from the crisis

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe provide novel evidence on the micro-structure of international trade during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global recession exploring a rich firm-level data set from Spain. The analysis is motivated by the surprisingly strong export performance of Spain in the aftermath of the great trade collapse (dubbed by some as the "Spanish export miracle"). The focus of our analysis is on changes at the extensive and intensive firm-level margins of trade, as well as on performance differences (jobs, productivity, and firm survival) across firms that differ in their export status. We find no adverse effects of the financial crisis on foreign market entry or exit, but a considerable increase in the export intensity of firms after the financial crisis. Moreover, we find that those firms that entered the crisis as exporters (and continued exporting throughout the crisis years) were more resilient to the crisis than those firms that restricted their sales to the domestic market. Finally, in contrast to exporters, non-exporters experienced a significant deterioration in their total factor productivity, which led to an overall decline in the productivity of a significant number of industries in Spanish manufacturing.JEL classifications: F10, F14, G01, D24.

Venting Out: Exports During a Domestic Slump

“…12 Our paper also relates to previous work documenting the behavior of firm-level exports in Spain around the Great Recession, including Antràs (2011), Myro (2015), Eppinger et al (2017), and De Lucio et al (2017aLucio et al ( , 2017b. This literature is largely descriptive and has not attempted to test the relative contribution of different mechanisms in explaining the patterns observed in the data.…”

Has the crisis affected Spanish investment strategy abroad? A spatial panel data approach

“…Thanks to its integration into the European Union in 1986, Spanish FDI outflows registered notable increases since the second half of the nineties (Campa & Guillén, 1996;Gordo, Martín, & Tello, 2008;Maté Rubio, 1996). 3 The outbreak of the economic crisis was, however, a turning point: from them on, and even though the lack of domestic demand forced Spanish firms to expand their business abroad (Eppinger, Meythaler, Sindlinger, & Smolka, 2018), FDI outflows plummeted. Furthermore, the crisis pushed Spanish firms to be more selective in their international endeavours (Gil-Pareja, Vivero, & Paniagua, 2013).…”

Economic and Policy Uncertainty: Export Dynamics and the Value of Agreements

“…In Belgium there is actually an increase in exporting firms of about 1% between the first semester of 2008 and that of 2009 (Behrens et al, 2013). In both France and Belgium, the intensive margin explains more of the decline in exports during the collapse and that is also the case for Spain (Eppinger et al, 2017).…”