Academic research recognizes that the organizational structure of banks could have implications for the financing of small businesses and entrepreneurial firms. In this chapter, we start by reviewing the underlying theoretical motivation and then summarize existing evidence. Overall, it is...

In this paper we study the relevance of the gender of the contracting parties involved in lending. We show that female entrepreneurs face tighter access to credit, even though they do not pay higher interest rates. The effect is independent of the information available about the borrower and...