Barking up the Wrong Tree? Measuring Gender Gaps in Firm’s Access to Finance

Abstract

The literature on gender-based discrimination in credit markets is recently expanding, but the results are not yet definitive and have not been generally agreed upon. This paper exploits a new dataset on Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, which provides detailed information about female ownership and management in firms for investigating the existence of a gender gap in access to finance. The evidence presented herein suggests that more precise measures of the gender composition of the firm show that women-led businesses are more likely to be financially constrained than other comparable firms.

Exploring Firm-Level Innovation and Productivity in Developing Countries: The Perspective of Caribbean Small States

“…In particular, it was not possible to single out those firms in which women-owned the majority of the firm. Moreover, in determining the gender of management, the WBES only took into consideration those firms with a female top manager, therefore discounting the different levels of female involvement in managerial responsibilities (Presbitero et al, 2014). Nevertheless, the advantage of these indicators was that they provided empirical evidence about the role of women within the firms in a large sample of countries, therefore making it possible to benchmark the Caribbean countries.…”

“…Women-led refers to firms with a woman as the major owner or shareholder and, among these firms, selects those in which the owner is in charge of major strategic and financial decisions (Presbitero et al, 2014). This dummy variable had restrictive conditions regarding the female presence in ownership and management so that we could be reasonably sure that the firm was actually led by a woman.…”

“…Some studies (e.g., Aterido et al, 2013;Presbitero et al, 2014) have suggested that access to financing is a possible cause of the productivity gap between women-and men-led businesses. Other studies (e.g., Orser et al, 2010;Marques, 2015) have suggested that different export propensity between firms led by women and men may be a reason for the gender gap.…”

“…This chapter aims to investigate whether this under-representation is justified by poorer productivity in firms managed or owned by women. Thanks to the wealth of information available in the Productivity, Technology, and Innovation (PROTEqIN) database and following some recent evidence that showed that definitions matter when estimating the gender gap (Presbitero, Rabellotti, and Piras, 2014), this study adopted a set of more precise measures of female ownership and management of a firm than those traditionally used in crosscountry investigations. Accordingly, we expected the results to differ depending on alternative (more or less restrictive) measures of gender composition in a firm's management and ownership.…”

Credit Access in Latin American Enterprises

“…• Constrained: Dummy identifying the borrowers whose loan applications were denied and those who decided not to apply because interest rates and collateral requirements were too high, the size of the loan and the maturity insufficient, or in general, they believed that the loan would not be approved (Hansen and Rand 2014;Presbitero et al 2014). …”