Empirical evidence that access to higher education is constrained by credit availability is limited and usually indirect. This paper provides direct evidence by comparing university enrollment rates of potential South African students, depending on whether or not they get a loan to cover their...

The paper investigates whether liquidity constraints affect firm size and growth dynamics using a large longitudinal sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We run standard panel-data Gibrat regressions, suitably expanded to take into account liquidity constraints (proxied by cash flow scaled by...

This paper uses micro data from four OECD countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands), to assess the determinants of household debt holding and to investigate whether or not credit constraints are important for household debt holding. We extend the existing literature in...

In this paper, we examine whether imperfections in credit markets spill over to other markets, particularly the labor market. We take the case of Italy, a country that experienced changes in the mortgage market brought about by the 1992 European unification and other institutional shifts. These...

We study the effects of the reform of the system of severance payments (TFR) of Italian employees on the cost and the access to credit for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The most direct consequence of the reform is to reduce in the long run the amount of liquid assets available to...

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...