Family-owned firms account for majority of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Arab countries, but evidence on the impact of this ownership type on access to credit in the region is scarce. Yet the issue is key for understanding barriers to the emergence of dynamic private sector and...

The paper argues that networked firms are likely to have an advantage in securing external finance in countries with weak legal and judicial institutions since it helps financial institutions to minimize the underlying agency costs of lending. An analysis of recent BEEPS data from fifteen...

In this paper we study the role of convertible securities in the financing of start-up enterprises when the entrepreneurs are better informed than the venture capitalists (VCs). We demonstrate that for a well-designed contract the conversion ratio of the securities can be used as a signaling...

Small Business Administration (SBA) loans have long been one of the most significant policy interventions in the U.S. affecting firm behavior, but little is known about their outcomes. This paper estimates the effects on employment using a list of all SBA loans linked to annual data on all U.S....

We analyze linked databases on all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans, on all SBA lenders, and on all U.S. employers to estimate the effects of financial access on employment growth. Our methods combine regressions with matching on firm age, size, industry, year, and employment history,...

This paper takes advantage of access to detailed matched bank-firm data to investigate whether and how employment decisions of SMEs have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability in banks' financial health following the 2008 crisis is used as an...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of easing credit constraints for rural producers in Mexico through loans provided by a national public development finance institution (DFI). In contrast to most of the existing literature, the study focuses on the effect of medium-sized loans over a two-...

We estimate the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) on small business lending in lower-income neighborhoods. Using 2004-2016 panel data on census tracts, we apply a combined regression discontinuity and fixed effect method. We find that the number of small business loans increases by...

Systemically important banks are subject to at least two departures from the neutrality of debt versus equity financing: the tax deductibility of interest payments and implicit funding subsidies. This paper fills a gap in the literature by comparing their mechanism and interaction within a...

Using the 2008-09 Global financial crisis and the 2012 Euro area sovereign debt crisis as natural experiments, we investigate the effects of contractions in credit supply on R&D spending in a large sample of European firms. Our identification strategy exploits differences in financial...