TY - JOUR

T1 - Gender difference in access to local finance and firm performance: Evidence from a panel survey in Vietnam

AU - Tran, Viet T.

AU - Nguyen, Trung Thanh

AU - Tran, Nguyet T.M.

N1 - Funding Information: The financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) under the grant number HE 2188/11-1 is gratefully acknowledged. Viet T. Tran gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training via Vietnam International Education Development (VIED) under project 911 and support from the Vietnam National University of Forestry. We thank two reviewers and the editor for their useful and constructive comments. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

PY - 2019/9

Y1 - 2019/9

N2 - Whether local financial development could reduce the constraints for women to promote economic growth is an important question that has been paid little attention. In this paper, we use data of more than 40,000 firms collected in Vietnam from 2009 to 2013 to examine the effects of local financial development, male ownership and the joint effect of these factors on firm growth. To address endogeneity issues which might arise by the causality from firm growth to local financial development, we employ the heteroscedasticity-based identification strategy. The results show that local financial development promotes firm performance in terms of the growth rates of sales, investment, sales per worker, return on investment (ROI), return on assets (ROA), and return on equity (ROE). The results also suggest the difference in entrepreneurs’ gender affects firm growth. Moreover, the joint effect of local financial development and male ownership is significantly negative through all specifications. This implies that local financial development could help reduce the gender gap in promoting firm growth.

AB - Whether local financial development could reduce the constraints for women to promote economic growth is an important question that has been paid little attention. In this paper, we use data of more than 40,000 firms collected in Vietnam from 2009 to 2013 to examine the effects of local financial development, male ownership and the joint effect of these factors on firm growth. To address endogeneity issues which might arise by the causality from firm growth to local financial development, we employ the heteroscedasticity-based identification strategy. The results show that local financial development promotes firm performance in terms of the growth rates of sales, investment, sales per worker, return on investment (ROI), return on assets (ROA), and return on equity (ROE). The results also suggest the difference in entrepreneurs’ gender affects firm growth. Moreover, the joint effect of local financial development and male ownership is significantly negative through all specifications. This implies that local financial development could help reduce the gender gap in promoting firm growth.

KW - Firm performance

KW - Gender gap

KW - Heteroscedasticity-based identification

KW - Local financial development

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85067001570&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.eap.2019.05.004

DO - 10.1016/j.eap.2019.05.004

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85067001570

VL - 63

SP - 150

EP - 164

JO - Economic Analysis and Policy

JF - Economic Analysis and Policy

SN - 0313-5926

ER -