Research
Globalization, Market Power and Innovation (with G. Impullitti, R. Martin, M. Muuls).
Demand Shocks versus Financial Frictions: Evidence from Trade Credit Data (with J-C. Bricongne, M. London and P. Pintus).
Trade Networks and Natural Disasters ( with MĂ©lina London).
We study how international trade networks react to large natural disasters. We combine exhaustive firm-to-firm trade credit and disaster data and use a dynamic differences-in-differences identification strategy to establish the causal effect of natural disasters on the size, shape and quality of international trade networks. We find strong and permanent negative effects on the exports and trade credit sales of French suppliers. This effect operates exclusively through the number of buyers. It is concentrated among suppliers with few buyers in the affected destination. Additionally, disasters induce a negative shift in the distribution of the quality of buyers.
Exporting Ideas: Knowledge Flows from Expanding Trade in Goods (With P. Aghion A. Bergeaud, M.Lequien and M.Melitz).
When a firm starts exporting into a new destination, its products and technologies suddenly become more visible there. Firms in that destination can then innovate building on these technologies. We combine French firm-level administrative, customs and patent data over 1995-2012 to show that entry into a new export market increases the patents' citations received from that destination. This technological spillover is concentrated in countries at intermediate levels of development and among the most productive firms.
Explaining the Persistent Effect of Demand Uncertainty on Firm Growth (With Jean-Charles Bricongne).
We study the effect of demand uncertainty on firm growth. We use product-level bilateral trade data and customs data to build an exogenous firm-level measure of demand uncertainty. We match it with exhaustive fiscal data between 1995 and 2013. A temporary increase in uncertainty has a negative and persistent impact on the growth of exposed firms. The persistence of this impact is not consistent with the real-option theory. We show that this persistence is explained by the less uncertain firms crowding out the more uncertain ones in the industry.
Cross-Border Investments and Uncertainty: Firm-level Evidence of a Reallocative Effect (With Rafael Cezar and Fabien Tripier). JIMF 2020.
This paper studies the impact of uncertainty on cross-border investments. We build a data-set of firm-level outward Foreign Direct Investments between 2000 and 2015. We create a time and country varying measure of uncertainty based on the dispersion of idiosyncratic investment returns. An increase in uncertainty delays cross-border flows to the affected country. Yet, this average effect hides strong heterogeneity. Firms with low ex-ante performance durably lower their foreign investments. Meanwhile high-performing firms overcompensate their investments after the initial shock. We interpret these results as the evidence of a cleansing effect of uncertainty shocks among multinational firms.
