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Gender Bias and Credit Access
Author(s) -
ONGENA STEVEN,
POPOV ALEXANDER
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of money, credit and banking
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.763
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 1538-4616
pISSN - 0022-2879
DOI - 10.1111/jmcb.12361
Subject(s) - loan , gender bias , demographic economics , access to finance , sample (material) , business , gender gap , immigration , survey data collection , set (abstract data type) , bank credit , finance , economics , political science , psychology , social psychology , chemistry , statistics , mathematics , chromatography , computer science , law , programming language
We extract an exogenous measure of gender bias from survey responses by descendants of U.S. immigrants on questions about the role of women in society. We then use data on around 6,000 small business firms from 17 countries and find that in high‐gender‐bias countries, female entrepreneurs are more likely to opt out of the loan application process and to resort to informal finance, even though banks do not appear to actively discriminate against them. These results are not driven by credit risk differences between female‐ and male‐owned firms or by any idiosyncrasies in the set of countries in our sample.