Financial constraints: Are there differences between manufacturing and services?

Abstract

This paper is the first to explicitly explore the differences in firms' financial constraints between and within sectors of economic activity, by estimating the sensitivities of cash holdings to cash-flow upon an unique dataset of Portuguese firms. It shows that, not only there are remarkable differences between sectors and, especially, industries, but most importantly, that the commonly accepted inverse relationships between financial constraints and size and age are not robust to sectorial disaggregation.Services; Financial constraints; Firm-level studies; Portugal.