Financial crisis effects on firm performance: an overview

This paper intents to depict the firm performance during the global financial crisis of 2007/2009, providing a broad overview based on the main literature and the empirical evidences. At firm level the effects of the crisis are tough both in term of financial and operating risk. The evidence suggests that crisis effects are propagated along the supply chains, from suppliers to their customers, with relevant implications for firms, to understand the financial channels to support the firm growth in crisis period. Concerning Italy, the problems regarding financial and trade credit are exacerbated. In particular, the global financial crisis has had an important impact on the small and medium-sized firms, in the form of a fall of the sales and difficulty to get payments from the customers, and has changed the strategies of the firms. This overview identifies several important opportunities for future research on firms financial strategies.