Banking Crisis and Exports 1980-2006

Exports data, from UN Comtrade, are disaggregated at 4 digits ISIC Rev 2 and cover the period 1980 to 2006. There are 81 industries at this level of disaggregation, however, not all countries have exported in all industries and years and therefore the resulting panel is unbalanced with the number of observations slightly above 30000.

The information on banking crises is obtained from Dell'Ariccia, Detragiache, and Rajan (2008) who identify 48 episodes of systemic financial crises in both developed and developing countries. Because we are only interested in the effect of pure banking crises we exclude all \twin crises" when a currency crisis occurred jointly with the banking crisis. The rationale for this exclusion is that we want to isolate the credit crunch channel from balance sheet effects. During twin crises, when large devaluations occur, firms with high exposure to foreign debt will be hit particularly hard. If these firms are also the firms highly dependent on external finance, the effect of the crisis on exporters that we observe might be a consequence of their own balance sheet problems rather than a consequence of the credit crunch due to the banking crisis. Finally, out of the remaining 32 crisis episodes we only have disaggregated trade data for 23 crises in 21 countries. We use Dell'Ariccia, Detragiache, and Rajan's (2008) database to identify the start of the crisis but in the estimations the financial crisis dummy is actually a \crisis window". This is equal to 1 if country if faces a financial crisis in year t as well as in the two following years .The reason of using a crisis window is because we are not only interested in the immediate short run effects of the crisis but also its medium-term effects. Furthermore, given the lumpiness of certain investments it is possible that the impact of the credit crunch due to the crisis may emerge with a lag as firms do not have to finance investment continuously.