Using firm level data on 70,000 enterprises in 107 countries, this paper finds important effects of access to finance, business regulations, corruption, and to a lesser extent, infrastructure bottlenecks in explaining patterns of job creation at the firm level. The paper focuses on how the...

We review the literature on financial constraints and the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We consider the important role that SMEs play in the economies of Australia and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. We examine the role of financial constraints in...

In the past decade inclusive growth, that is job-rich growth, has topped the policy agenda in developing countries. This paper investigates how the access to finance affects employment in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Sub-Saharan Africa. It first presents a model where firm...

Using a panel of 1122 UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange over the period of 1981 to 2009, endogenous switching regression models (SRM) incorporating a predicted corporate efficiency index are estimated in this paper in an effort to clarify the role of cash flow in examining the impact...

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...

We use a unique dataset to estimate the impact of a large credit supply shock on employment in Spain. We exploit marked differences in banks' health at the onset of the Great Recession. Several weak banks were rescued by the State and they reduced credit more than other banks. We compare...

Does the availability of internal finance constrain firm growth? Or does it foster it? To answer these questions, we use a panel of 407,096 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005. We estimate dynamic assets growth equations augmented with cash flow, and find that the growth of state owned...

We match survey data of Italian firms that includes a repeated experiment in which information about inflation is randomly provided to firms over time with detailed credit data that covers the borrowing decisions of firms. This allows us to study how exogenous variation in inflation expectations...

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,...

We investigate the interdependence of debt financing and R&D activities of young firms. Using micro-level data of the KfW/ZEW Start-up Panel, our estimation results show that firm characteristics are more important than personal characteristics of the founders for explaining young firms'...