Uma análise sobre a relação entre crédito e produtividade das firmas brasileiras de capital aberto

Abstract

Between 2003 and 2013, the Brazilian economy underwent a cycle of expansion of monetary liquidity, driven by increase of credit destinated to private sector. In this period, a ratio between credit and Gross Domestic Product reached levels never previously observed. The firms have increased the access to financial resources and, consequently, the indebtedness. On the other hand, Brazilian interest rates remained among the highest in the world. This raises questions regarding the effect of credit access in firm’s productivity. In this context, the present work has the objective of analyzing the relationship between the degree of external financing and the productivity of Brazilian publicly traded firms. The productivity measure used comes from the stochastic frontier models of production. For each firm, the work measured the deviation of realized output from potential output, predict from the vector of observed variables. This vector includes the stock of tangible and intangible capital and a skilled and unskilled labor force. In this sense, it is estimated a relationship between the deviations, which represent a loss of productivity, and an external financing variable, given by the provision between the credit and the value of the total assets. The parameters were estimated using a sectoral differentiation, as a strategy to control the technological and conjunctural aspects, to each one of the sectors is subject. It is concluded that the financing is important to explain a large part of the sectors productivity. However, the direction of the effect varies among activities. In industrial sectors (except the construction), the highest levels of external financing reduce the productivity on average. In agriculture, services, infrastructure and construction, higher degrees of funding increases productivity on average. In the commerce sector, there is no consistent evidence that the relationship is significant. It is argued that the direction of the effect depends on markets dinamic’s and on production structure of each sector.