Trade and Credit: Revisiting the Evidence

This paper explores the effects of bank lending shocks on export behavior of Spanish firms. For that purpose, we combine Balance of Payments data on exports at the firmproduct-destination level with a matched bank-firm dataset incorporating information on the universe of corporate loans from 2002 to 2013. Armed with this dataset, we identify bankyear specific credit supply shocks following Amiti and Weinstein (2018) and estimate their impact on firms’ exports at the product-destination level. According to our estimates, credit supply shocks have sizable effects on both the intensive margin (amount exported) and the extensive margin of trade (decision to export).