The effects of tax evasion and the inefficiency of the legal system on firms’ financial constraints: are they complements or substitutes?.

This paper analyzes the joint impact of tax evasion and the inefficiency of the legal system on firms’ financial constraints. We find that both variables have a statistically significant effect on the difficulties that firms encounter when trying to access financing and this effect is nonlinear. In particular, tax evasion and the inefficiency of the legal system are substitute as they mitigate each other’s effects on firms’ credit constraints. It means that the negative impact of tax evasion on financial constraints faced by firms decreases in the presence of a lower efficiency of the legal system.