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, fi-
nancial 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.