Firm, Owner, and Financing Characteristics: Differences between Female- and Male-owned Small Businesses

2002

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Differences in financing patterns and financial characteristics between female- and male-owned firms are often attributed to imperfections in credit markets. However, these differences could arise for many reasons, such as differences in the characteristics and preferences of owners and firms. The differences in lending patterns by gender may in fact have little or nothing to do with supply side factors or market imperfections. The goal of our paper is to test the hypothesis that differences in financing patterns between female- and male-owned small businesses can be explained by differences in business, credit history, and owner characteristics other than gender. In what follows, we first describe how owner, business, and financing characteristics of female-owned businesses differ from male-owned businesses. We then conduct a multivariate analysis of indicators of credit use and recent lending experiences, modeling each of these as a function of firm, owner, and credit history characteristics.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7217d0b912373614a7a8ea216b2ef0d8408e485

Citations in the corpus

• The Barriers to Growth in Ghana (2008, unknown): “Another study undertaken in the US by Robb and Wolken (2002) found that female owned firms were considered to be a greater credit risk than the male-owned firms as measured by Dun and Bradstreet credit scores.”
• Small Business Loan Turndowns, Personal Wealth, and Discrimination (2002, unknown): “Also see Robb and Wolken (2002) who present descriptive statistics for white male- and female-owned businesses from SSBF98.”
• Financing of women-owned ventures: The impact of gender and other owner -and firm-related variables (2006, unknown): “…to their personal savings, credit cards or loans from family and friends in order to finance their business, rather than using bank loans or commercial credit (Carter and Rosa, 1998; Cliff, 1998; Cooper Maysami and Goby, 1999; Coleman, 2000; Orhan, 2001; Robb and Wolken, 2002; St Cyr, 2002).”
• The gender gap in bank credit access (2019, unknown): “Robb and Wolken (2002), Galli and Rossi (2016) and Moro et al. (2017) also report female entrepreneurs are less likely to request loans as compared to their male counterparts.”
• Women-Owned businesses and access to bank credit: Evidence from three surveys since 1987 (2006, unknown): “Womenowned businesses are typically considered riskier than those owned by men (Riding and Swift, 1990; Fabowale et al., 1995; Coleman and Carsky, 1996; Robb and Wolken, 2002).”
• Gender Issues in Entrepreneurship (2009, unknown): “Women’s businesses tend to be less profitable than those of men (Robb and Wolken, 2002) and to generate lower sales turnover than men, even in same industry comparisons (Chaganti and Parasuraman, 1996).”
• Microcredit: an answer to the gender problem in funding? (2011, unknown): “Whereas Robb and Wolken (2002), or Cole and Mehran (2009) for the United States, demonstrate that when the characteristics of the firm and its owner are taken into account, women have equal access to credit.8 Other studies found that structural disparities cannot account for all the gender…”
• A comparison of new firm financing by gender: evidence from the Kauffman Firm Survey data (2009, unknown): “A number of studies have noted that women-owned firms are smaller than men-owned firms in terms of sales, assets, and number of employees (Coleman 2002; Robb and Wolken 2002; Fairlie and Robb 2009).”
• Constraints faced by women entrepreneurs in developing countries: review and ranking (2018, unknown): “This mesh of constraints results in multiple negative consequences for women-led ventures: smaller size (Coleman, 2007), lower growth rate (Coleman, 2007), reduced profitability (Robb and Wolken, 2002) and high failure rate (Minniti and Naudé, 2010).”
• How do female entrepreneurs perform? Evidence from three developing regions (2011, unknown): “It has also been shown that on average employer-firms owned by women generate only 78 percent of the profits generated by comparable male owned businesses (Robb and Wolken 2002).”