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...

This paper uses a dataset from one of the largest credit card issuers in Brazil to investigate the extent of credit constraints for one of the world's largest emerging market economies. In order to deal with the endogeneity problem from an observational dataset, an identification strategy based...

The paper examines whether financially constrained firms are able to use acquisitions to ease their constraints. The results show that acquisitions do ease financing constraints for constrained acquirers. Relative to unconstrained acquires, financially constrained firms are more likely to use...

Capital accumulation in Argentina was slow in the 1990s, despite high total factor productivity (TFP) growth and low international interest rates. A possible explanation for the "missing capital" is that foreign investors were reluctant to take advantage of the high returns to investment...

We study the relationship between financial constraints and employment formalization by exploiting heterogeneity in the industry-level degree of financial dependence, in the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998). This dependence, and variation in aggregate credit, lets us measure industry-level...

This paper provides a policy-oriented summary of the econometric study commissioned by the European Court of Auditors, in the context of its audit of EU-funded loan guarantee instruments.2 The study assesses the real performance effects of EU-guaranteed loans to SMEs disbursed in France during...