Firm surveys often indicate that firms complain a lot about lack of access to financial services, but financing constraints are difficult to identify, given demand and supply considerations and with only surveys based on firms' perceptions. Specifically, it is difficult to separate demand for...

Using a unique firm level data set-the Enterprise Surveys-this paper develops a new measure of credit-constrained status for firms using hard data instead of perceptions data. The paper classifies firms into four ordinal categories: Not Credit Constrained, Maybe Credit Constrained, Partially...

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,...