finance in countries with stronger rule of law and better credit information, and that the reliance of young firms on informal … finance decreases with the availability of credit information. Overall, the results suggest that improvements to the legal … environment and availability of credit information are disproportionately beneficial for promoting access to formal finance by …

of bank competition on firms' access to finance. They find that low competition, as measured by high values of the Lerner … index, diminishes firms' access to finance, while commonly-used bank concentration measures are not robust predictors of … firms' access to finance. In addition, they find that the impact of competition on access to finance depends on the …

for movable assets on firms' access to bank finance. It compares firms' access to bank finance in seven countries that …' access to bank finance. There is also some evidence that this effect is larger among smaller firms …

leveraged on average, she finds that smaller firms have significantly less access to bank finance than larger firms do. This …

suggestive (but not definite) evidence of stronger credit constraints for smaller firms. This paper--a product of the Finance … Team, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the department to study access to finance"--World Bank web …