Does access to external finance improve productivity? Evidence from a natural experiment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Butler, Alexander W.; Cornaggia, Jess
• 署名单位: Rice University; Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; IU Kelley School of Business
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-405X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2010.08.009
• 发表日期: 2011
• 页码: 184-203
• 关键词: Access to finance; Economic growth

摘要

We study the relation between access to finance and productivity. Our contribution to the literature is a clean identification of a causal effect of access to finance on productivity. Specifically, we exploit an exogenous shift in demand for a product to expose how producers adapt their productivity in the presence of varying levels of access to finance. We use a triple differences testing approach and find that production increases the most over the sample period in areas with relatively strong access to finance, even in comparison with a control group. This result is statistically significant and robust to a variety of controls, alternative variables, and tests. The causal effect of access to finance on productivity that we find speaks to the larger role of finance in economic growth. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V.