Essays on firms, investment and credit in emerging markets

This dissertation consists of three essays on firms, investment and credit in the context of an emerging market. The first essay studies the economic impact of government credit market intervention. Using comprehensive plant-level data for the universe of Brazilian manufacturing firms, I develop an empirical methodology to investigate how the allocation of credit by a large government owned financial institution influences the investment and employment decisions of firms. My key findings are as follows. First, exogenous variation in political preferences for investments across regions has a large influence over the allocation of government credit. Second, government credit does succeed in raising investment and employment in the politically favored regions. Third, these localized increases in investment and employment do not represent net expansions for firms. Rather, they are driven by multi-location firms which internally shift capital and labor towards those regions favored by politicians, and away from those that are lacking in political advocacy. The analysis supports a theory where this is the outcome of a bargain between firms and politicians. The second essay presents a new methodology for estimating the importance of agglomeration spillovers in explaining the spatial concentration of manufacturing industries. When applied to data on Brazilian manufacturing firms, this methodology leads to results supporting the existence of economically important spillovers. The third essay combines several empirical approaches and unique data to compare the investment and growth behavior of private and publicly traded firms in the Brazilian manufacturing sector. In contrast with several theories, I find evidence that firms are not using public markets to invest more, grow faster or become more active in several observable margins. I discuss the implications of those results.