Capital controls, corporate debt and real effects

Andrea Fabiani, Martha López, Jose-Luis Peydro and Paul E. Soto

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: Non-US firms have massively borrowed dollars (foreign currency, FX), which may lead to booms and crises. We show the real effects of capital controls, including prudential benefits, through a firm-debt mechanism. Our identification exploits the introduction of a tax on FX-debt inflows in Colombia before the global financial crisis (GFC), and administrative, proprietary datasets, including loan-level credit register data and firm-level information on FX-debt inflows and imports/exports. Our results show that capital controls substantially reduce FX-debt inflows, particularly for firms with larger ex-ante FX-debt exposure. Moreover, firms with weaker local banking relationships cannot substitute FX-debt with domestic-debt and experience a reduction in total debt and imports upon implementation of the policy. However, our results suggest that, by preemptively reducing pre-crisis firm-level debt, capital controls boost exports during the subsequent GFC, especially among financially-constrained firms.

Keywords: Capital controls; corporate FX-debt; real effects; macroprudential; capital inflows (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F3 F38 F4 F6 G01 G15 G21 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn, nep-fdg, nep-ifn, nep-mon and nep-opm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1833.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Capital Controls, Corporate Debt and Real Effects (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1833

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).