Financial leverage and export quality: evidence from France

Does corporate financial structure matter for a firm’s ability to compete in international markets through output quality? This study answers this question by using firm-level export and balance sheet data covering a large sample of French manufacturing exporters over the period 1997–2007. The main result is that there is a negative causal relation between a firm’s leverage and export quality, where quality is inferred from the estimation of a discrete choice model of foreign consumers’ demand. This result is robust across different specifications and estimation techniques. In addition, by estimating investment models we find that the negative impact of leverage on quality is consistent with theories predicting that the agency cost of debt determines suboptimal investment

Productivity and market selection of french manufacturing firms in the nineties

In this paper, we analyse post-entry and pre-exit performance of French manufacturing firms using a dataset covering 14 industries over the period 1990-2002. Our purpose is to shed light on the working of market selection mechanisms within French manufacturing industries. We found that market selection in France rightly operates in favour of more productive firms, but displays some potential inefficiency in selecting more severely new firms compared to mature firms. This claim is based on three results. First, on average, young firms fail to survive when they are faced with a small productivity disadvantage with respect to incumbents. By contrast, mature firms exit the market only when they are confronted by a large, persistent, and increasing productivity gap with their surviving counterparts. Second, we show that successful entrants do not easily catch up to the average size of the industry despite the fact that they exhibit significant TFP and profitability advantages over incumbents. This reveals the existence of barriers to growth for young firms. Thirdly, we show that, on the whole, productivity improvements due to market selection mechanisms within French manufacturing industries are primarily due to market share reallocation across incumbents and that the net entry effect is weak relative to the findings for other industrialised countries

Caractéristiques et performances des firmes exportatrices françaises

Cette étude analyse le lien entre l’efficacité productive et les performances à l’exportation de 23 000 entreprises manufacturières françaises entre 1990 et 2002. Nous montrons que les firmes exportatrices françaises sont en moyenne plus grandes, plus intensives en capital et plus productives que leurs homologues non exportatrices. Ce résultat est conforme aux études existantes concernant nos voisins européens, i.e. l’Allemagne, la Grande-Bretagne, l’Espagne et l’Italie. Nous obtenons toutefois deux résultats propres à la France. Tout d’abord, contrairement aux idées reçues, la participation des PME françaises (20-250 employés) aux exportations est relativement élevée. En revanche, leur intensité d’exportation (ratio exportations/chiffre d’affaires) est, en moyenne, relativement faible. Ensuite, la décision d’exporter ne semble pas liée à une efficacité productive préalablement supérieure. Les bonnes performances des firmes exportatrices résultent de gains de productivité postérieurs aux premières exportations. Ces gains suggèrent l’existence d’effets d’apprentissage et sont d’autant plus élevés que la part des exportations dans le chiffre d’affaires est forte. La faiblesse relative des PME françaises en matière d’intensité d’exportation devrait donc constituer une préoccupation importante de la politique économique française

Simulation of Postsynaptic Glutamate Receptors Reveals Critical Features of Glutamatergic Transmission

Activation of several subtypes of glutamate receptors contributes to changes in postsynaptic calcium concentration at hippocampal synapses, resulting in various types of changes in synaptic strength. Thus, while activation of NMDA receptors has been shown to be critical for long-term potentiation (LTP) and long term depression (LTD) of synaptic transmission, activation of metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) has been linked to either LTP or LTD. While it is generally admitted that dynamic changes in postsynaptic calcium concentration represent the critical elements to determine the direction and amplitude of the changes in synaptic strength, it has been difficult to quantitatively estimate the relative contribution of the different types of glutamate receptors to these changes under different experimental conditions. Here we present a detailed model of a postsynaptic glutamatergic synapse that incorporates ionotropic and mGluR type I receptors, and we use this model to determine the role of the different receptors to the dynamics of postsynaptic calcium with different patterns of presynaptic activation. Our modeling framework includes glutamate vesicular release and diffusion in the cleft and a glutamate transporter that modulates extracellular glutamate concentration. Our results indicate that the contribution of mGluRs to changes in postsynaptic calcium concentration is minimal under basal stimulation conditions and becomes apparent only at high frequency of stimulation. Furthermore, the location of mGluRs in the postsynaptic membrane is also a critical factor, as activation of distant receptors contributes significantly less to calcium dynamics than more centrally located ones. These results confirm the important role of glutamate transporters and of the localization of mGluRs in postsynaptic sites in their signaling properties, and further strengthen the notion that mGluR activation significantly contributes to postsynaptic calcium dynamics only following high-frequency stimulation. They also provide a new tool to analyze the interactions between metabotropic and ionotropic glutamate receptors

PSYCHIATRIE ET MEDECINE HUMANITAIRE (A PROPOS DE L'INTERVENTION DU SAMU MONDIAL ET DE MEDECINS DU MONDE AU KOSOVO EN 1999)

LILLE2-BU Santé-Recherche (593502101) / SudocPARIS-BIUM (751062103) / SudocSudocFranceF

Financial leverage and export quality: Evidence from France

International audienc

Post-entry and Pre-exit Performance of French Manufacturing Firms(<Featured Theme><LIA-CASSH Report 2008>Comparative Approaches in Social Sciences and Humanities: A French-Japanese Initiative via Joint International Laboratory between CNRS and University of Tokyo)

This paper analyses post-entry and pre-exit performance of Manufacturing firms using a French dataset covering 14 manufacturing industries over the period 1990-2002. The main focus is on market selection mechanisms looking at total factor productivity levels of entrants and exitors relative to incumbent firms. Entrants are found to outperform incumbents, while exitors are less efficient than their surviving counterparts. We nonetheless found key distinguishable features of exit patterns between young and mature firms. Young exiting firms do not display productivity disadvantage relative to incumbent firms. By contrast, mature exiting firms display large and persistent productivity disadvantage relative to their surviving counterparts (shadow of death effect). The determinants of exit differ for entrants and incumbents. Productive inefficiency is a key determinant of the exit of mature firms but hot entrants