We examine how consumer credit access impacts self-employment and small business ownership by building a new dataset that links 3 million individual earnings and credit reports to pass-through tax records. We show that self-employment and employer business ownership increase with personal credit...

Small businesses, the majority of Spanish firms, rarely file for formal bankruptcy when dealing with financial distress. This is why business bankruptcy rates in Spain are among the lowest in the world, even during the current economic crisis. To explain this fact we present the following...

In the U.S., individual parties who file for bankruptcy can exempt a certain dollar amount of property from creditor liquidation during the debt settlement process. We examine the effect of changes to these protection laws on bank lending to small businesses. Our results indicate that additional...