External Financing, Export Intensity and Inter‐Organizational Collaborations: Evidence from Canadian SMEs^*

* The authors appreciate the constructive comments and suggestions provided during the evaluation process. They thank the anonymous reviewers and the assistant editor for their helpful comments as well as the Canada Research Chairs Program for its financial support of this research.

Abstract

Drawing on institutional theory, resource‐based perspective and internationalization theory, we propose that the domestic collaborations of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) have a direct positive effect on their export intensity, as well as an indirect effect through enhancing these firms' access to external financing. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 151 Canadian manufacturing SMEs and find partial support for the indirect relationship. Overall, our results suggest that domestic collaborations positively affect SMEs' access to equity financing but not to bank financing. While both equity and bank financing are found to enhance these firms' export intensity, bank financing seems to have a greater impact. The implications of these results are discussed.

* The authors appreciate the constructive comments and suggestions provided during the evaluation process. They thank the anonymous reviewers and the assistant editor for their helpful comments as well as the Canada Research Chairs Program for its financial support of this research.

* The authors appreciate the constructive comments and suggestions provided during the evaluation process. They thank the anonymous reviewers and the assistant editor for their helpful comments as well as the Canada Research Chairs Program for its financial support of this research.

Notes

* The authors appreciate the constructive comments and suggestions provided during the evaluation process. They thank the anonymous reviewers and the assistant editor for their helpful comments as well as the Canada Research Chairs Program for its financial support of this research.

1 The internationalization literature suggests several other factors that may influence export intensity such as the firm's level of innovation, its culture, and its experience with exports (Sousa, Martinez‐López, and Coelho 2008). We have included two control variables only, that is the firm size and the owner‐manager interest in international activities, for three main reasons: (1) the impact of these two variables on exports in the particular context of SMEs has been demonstrated in past empirical research; (2) these two variables are available from the database we used; and (3) our research objective is not to study the determinants of export intensity but to focus on the effect of collaborations and external financing.

2 Chin and Newsted (1999) recommend using a number of observations that is at least 10 times greater than the highest number of structural links to one of the model's constructs. In this study, the highest number of links is five (see Figure 2).

3 As a robustness check, we also ran the model using Stata and very similar results were found.

4 We thank the anonymous reviewer who suggested this explanation.

Additional information

Funding

Canada Research Chairs

Notes on contributors

Josée St‐pierre

Josée St‐Pierre is professor in Finance at the University of Quebec at Trois‐Rivières.

Ouafa Sakka

Ouafa Sakka is an associate professor in Accounting at the Sprott School of Business, Carleton University.

Moujib Bahri

Moujib Bahri is professor in Entrepreneurial Finance at the Teluq.