題目：Financial Development and Micro-Entrepreneurship（金融發(fā)展與小微企業(yè)創(chuàng)業(yè)，JFQA2022）

摘要：Does financial development facilitate micro-entrepreneurship? Using randomized surveys of over 1 million Indian households and bank-branch location as predetermined by government policy, we find that access to finance shifts workers from informal microentrepreneurship into formal employment. Financial access reduces the likelihood of being self-employed but benefits micro-enterprises with employees, as well as formal firms. Using data on 400,000 firms, we find that in districts with more banks, firms have higher loans, productivity, employment, and wages than firms in less banked districts. This evidence suggests a labor-market mechanism by which financial development facilitates growth: by shifting workers from unproductive micro-entrepreneurship into productive employment.

研究問題：

- Whether access to finance is correlated with an individual’s decision to be self-employed versus seeking salaried employment, as well as firms’ employment decisions.

研究動機：

- Worldwide, less than 14% of advanced-economy workers are self-employed, compared with over 50% of the workforce in emerging markets.Given the considerable evidence that financial development facilitates entrepreneurship,why are there more self-employed individuals in less developed countries?

研究設(shè)計：

- To study the labor-market effects of financial development, we use data on nearly 1 million Indian households and over 400,000 service-sector firms to examine whether access to finance is correlated with the occupational choices of individuals and the employment decisions of firms. We further investigate the underlying mechanism by studying whether access to finance is correlated with the borrowing, productivity, and employment decisions of firms

- To establish the mechanism by which access to finance improves efficiency in labor allocation, we use data from 2 rounds of a randomized survey of over 400,000 service-sector firms.

研究發(fā)現(xiàn)：

- We observe that greater access to finance is associated with a decrease in the likelihood of being a selfemployed micro-entrepreneur who does not employ any workers. Instead, individuals in more financially developed districts are more likely to be employed formally for wages.

研究貢獻(xiàn)：

- First, our results highlight an aspect of entrepreneurship that has not received much attention in the literature.

- Athough a large literature has documented the macroeconomic effects of financial development on economic growth，not much is known about the microfoundations of why growth occurs.

除此之外：

- Our results that financial access reduces the likelihood of solo employment with no employees, increases the absorption of micro-enterprise workers into the formal sector, and increases the likelihood of being a micro-enterprise employer have implications for finance and labor-market policies in emerging markets

- We identify access to finance using the location of government-owned bank branches at the district level in 199l, prior to liberalization. Our identification strategy is based on two arguments: i) Historical financial access is correlated with current branch location, and ii) pre-liberalization branch location is driven by the licensing policy rather than regional characteristics that affect labor-market choices.

- We also investigate the validity of our identification strategy under a plausible selection mechanism where banks in the early 1990s may have selected to locate in districts that were high growth at that time.