In the past few decades, commercial banks have substantially reduced the number of their branch offices. We address the question of whether or not the increased distance from the lenders correspondingly faced by many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) translates into a lower volume of...

Whether public lending to firms effectively eases credit constraints has been widely studied for very small businesses. The evidence documented for larger firms refers to lending that is significantly subsidized and targeted to these businesses, so the estimated positive effects may reflect poor...

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...

Financial institutions are key to allocate capital to its most productive uses. In order to examine the relationship between productivity and bank credit in the context of different financial market set-ups, we introduce a model of overlapping generations of entrepreneurs under complete and...

This paper advocates for incorporating timely measures of firms' current situation and future expectations when disentangling real effects of credit supply from demand-side factors. Identification of supply-side effects in firm-level analyses often relies on balance sheet variables to control...

We exploit historical and contemporaneous variation in local credit markets across Russia to identify the impact of credit constraints on firm-level innovation. We find that access to bank credit helps firms to adopt existing products and production processes that are new to them. They introduce...

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...

Firm investment, Intangible assets, Loan terms, Credit constraint, Survey data, Instrumental variable approachUsing European firm-level data from a new survey, the EIBIS, we document the effect of bank loan terms on investment in intangible assets of non-financial corporations. We show that...

Based on automated credit lines to more than two million vendors trading on Alibaba’s online retail platform, we show how the take-up of FinTech credit varies with the entrepreneur’s bank distance. Proximity to the branches of the five largest stateowned banks correlates positively with the...

To analyze whether the occurrence of elections affects access to credit for firms, we perform an investigation using firm-level data covering 44 developed and developing countries. The results show that elections impair access to credit. Specifically, firms are more credit-constrained in...