Christian Keuschnigg

Capital reallocation across firms is a key source of productivity gains. This paper studies the ‘Schumpeterian role’ of banks: They liquidate loans to firms with poor prospects and reallocate the proceeds to more successful, expanding firms. To absorb liquidation losses without violating regulatory requirements, banks need to raise costly equity buffers ex ante. To economize on these buffers, they tend to reallocate too little credit and continue lending to weak firms. Tight capital standards, differentiated risk weights and low costs of bank equity facilitate reallocation. If agency costs of outside equity financing are not too high, their ability to reallocate credit renders banks more efficient than direct finance.

Access to external funds is crucial for the entry and expansion of entrepreneurial firms and the sectors they predominantly arise in. This paper reports three important results. First, comparative advantage is shaped by factor endowments as well as fundamental determinants of corporate finance. In particular, a larger equity ratio of firms and tough governance standards relax financing constraints, lead to entry of firms at the lower bound of the productivity distribution, and create an endogenous comparative advantage in sectors where entrepreneurial firms are clustered. Second, a small degree of protection in the constrained sector can raise a country’s welfare by relaxing financing constraints if terms-of-trade effects are small. Third, a small degree of protection of the financially dependent industry in a financially underdeveloped country might even raise world welfare.