Vangelis Pastelakos (AUEB), Yannis Bilias (AUEB) and Panos Hatzipanayotou (AUEB)
Abstract: A growing literature on competitiveness and international trade has highlighted the importance of firm-level factors for exporting. We overcome the data unavailability by collecting data on Greek firms’ international operations via a survey. Our findings indicate that export changes are mostly related to foreign demand while constraints in financing are related to firms’ extroversion levels. Large and young firms were more resilient to the global trade decline. Policy implications and promising directions for future research are derived by combining our results on trade discouraging factors during the financial crisis and export enhancement factors in times of economic turbulence.