Impact of gender on access to finance in developing countries

This paper studies the effect of female ownership on access to finance on a broad panel of developing countries. We find that female owners generally face more credit constraints compared to their male counterparts, however, such constraints are lower for women-owned firms that have an experienced senior management. We further show that with better institutional and policy environment in a country, women-owned firms face fewer credit constraints. Our findings remain robust when tested across a sample of small and medium enterprises (hereinafter SMEs) and other sensitivity tests.