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

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. (C) 2019 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.