During the global financial crisis, the Reserve Bank of India enacted forbearance measures that lowered capital provisioning rates for loans under temporary liquidity stress. Matched bank-firm data reveal that troubled banks took advantage of the policy to also shield firms facing serious...

This paper analyzes the role of liquidity constraints in the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises. The basic empirical strategy is to determine whether an individual's wealth affects the probability of becoming an entrepreneur, and the conditional amounts of depreciable assets, ceteris...

This paper analyzes the role of liquidity constraints in the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises. The basic empirical strategy is to determine whether an individual's wealth affects the probability of becoming an entrepreneur, and the conditional amounts of depreciable assets, ceteris...

Why do levels of entrepreneurship differ across America's cities? This paper presents basic facts on two measures of entrepreneurship: the self-employment rate and the number of small firms. Both of these measures are correlated with urban success, suggesting that more entrepreneurial cities are...

An ongoing debate in employment policy is whether promoting small and medium enterprises creates more employment. Do small enterprises generate more employment growth than larger firms? We use the elimination of small-scale industry (SSI) promotion in India to address this question. For 60...

Although a large literature seeks to explain the "missing middle" of mid-sized firms in developing countries, there is surprisingly little empirical backing for existence of the missing middle. Using microdata on the full distribution of both formal and informal sector manufacturing firms in...

Small and young businesses are essential for job creation, innovation, and economic growth. Even most of the superstar firms start their business life small and then grow over time. Small firms have less internal resources, which makes them more fragile and sensitive to macroeconomic conditions....