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Daniela Maresch

17 May 2017
WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2063
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Abstract
We investigate the impact of employment protection on firms credit access by looking at both credit obtained from banks and firms’ decision to apply for a loan. We find that greater flexibility in structuring the employees’ working hours and in dismissing employees increases the probability that firms obtain credit and that greater flexibility in dismissing employees decreases the probability that firms are discouraged from applying for credit. However, our findings also reveal that firms perceive regulations providing flexibility with regard to the employees’ working hours differently from banks, leading to a situation in which firms are more likely to be discouraged from applying for a loan, even though the probability to obtain a loan increases. Our results are robust to confounding, endogeneity, selection bias as well as to alternative specifications.
JEL Code
D22 : Microeconomics→Production and Organizations→Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
G21 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Banks, Depository Institutions, Micro Finance Institutions, Mortgages
G32 : Financial Economics→Corporate Finance and Governance→Financing Policy, Financial Risk and Risk Management, Capital and Ownership Structure, Value of Firms, Goodwill
J41 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Particular Labor Markets→Labor Contracts
13 July 2015
WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 1829
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Abstract
We investigate the role of the judicial system on whether or not the firms obtain the credit they applied for, by looking at the strength of the creditor protection, the strength of property rights, the time for resolving a dispute, its costs and the number of procedures the plaintiff faces. We use data about 48,590 firms from eleven countries collected via the Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (European Central Bank) and data from the World Bank, the Heritage Foundation and Eurostat. The results suggest that the better the judicial enforcement system is (reduced costs, reduced time, and limited number of procedures) and the higher the creditor protection is (high overall strength of the legal system, high property rights protection), the lower the probability that the firms are credit constrained. Our results are robust to selection bias (Heckman selection) as well as different controls and different estimation techniques. More importantly, we find that these variables have considerable economic impact: the probability to obtain credit is up to 40% higher in countries with a better legal system.
JEL Code
G21 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Banks, Depository Institutions, Micro Finance Institutions, Mortgages
G28 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Government Policy and Regulation
K41 : Law and Economics→Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior→Litigation Process