Financial constraints, global engagement, and firm survival in the United Kingdom: Evidence from micro data

Financial constraints have been found to play an important role on various aspects of firm behavior. Yet, their effects on firm survival have been largely neglected. We use a panel of 61,496 UK firms over the period 1997-2002 to study the effects of financial variables on firms' failure probabilities, differentiating firms into globally engaged and purely domestic. Estimating a wide range of specifications, we find that lower collateral and higher leverage result in higher failure probabilities for purely domestic than for globally engaged firms. This can be seen as evidence that global engagement shields firms from financial constraints.