The CEPR Network on Household Finance is inviting you to join the online seminar from the CEPR Household Finance Seminar Series on Friday 10 March 2023

Presenter: Julia Fonseca (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Paper: How Much Do Small Businesses Rely on Personal Credit?

Co-Author: Jialan Wang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Paper Abstract: 
This paper estimates the degree of substitution between personal and small business credit for U.S. entrepreneurs between 2009 and 2018 using a novel, individual-level dataset. We identify the effect of business credit supply shocks by exploiting geographic variation in the market share of large banks, which sharply reduced credit supply to small businesses after the 2008 financial crisis. This contraction decreased total business credit by $13,572 per firm in our sample, and we find that entrepreneurs were able to substitute for about 68% of this decline with personal credit, driven by mortgages. Entrepreneurs with subprime credit scores, below-average income, and high credit utilization do not substitute lost business credit with personal credit. Thus, we find that the personal financial characteristics of entrepreneurs meaningfully affect overall access to external finance for small businesses.

Next Seminar: 

April 14:

Presenter: Felix Fattinger (WU Vienna)

Paper: Interest Rates, Competition, and Complexity: Demand and Supply of Retail Financial Products

Co-Authors: Marc Chesney (University of Zurich), Nils Jonathan Krakow (University of Zurich) and Simon Straumann (WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management)


If you would like to register for the Seminar Series, please register on Zoom here

For other queries please contact Lydia Williams, Events Officer at [email protected] or visit the Seminar Webpage here