摘要：We assess the impact of credit constraints on investment, inventories and other workingcapital and firm growth with a large panel of small and medium-sized enterprises from 12European countries for the period 2014-2016. The data come from the Survey on theaccess to finance of enterprises (SAFE), a survey that is especially designed to analysethe problems in the access to external finance of European SMEs. The key identificationchallenge is a potential reverse-causality bias, as firms with poor investment and growthopportunities may have a higher probability of being credit constrained. We implementseveral strategies to overcome this obstacle: proxies for investment opportunities, laggedregressors, random effects and instrumental variables. Our findings suggest that creditconstraints, both in bank financing and other financing (e.g. trade credit), have strongnegative effects on investment in fixed assets, while the impact on firm growth and workingcapital is less robust.
关键词：investment; firm growth; working capital; ordered probit; instrumental variables
