Financial Factors and Manufacturing Exports:Theory and Firm-level Evidence From Egypt
This paper focuses on the effects of financial factors on manufacturing firms' export participation. Using a simple dynamic discrete choice model, we first present the intuition according to which financial constraints reduce the probability of exporting. Then, based on a panel of Egyptian manufacturing firms over the 2003-2008 period, we estimate the impact of financial constraints on export market participation. Our main results show that, unlike financial liquidity, financial constraints reduce the export participation of Egyptian firms. In addition, financial constraints equally have a negative impact on alternative measures of the export activity, namely the export intensity and the time firm take before starting to export