Gender bias and credit access

We extract an exogenous measure of gender bias from survey responses by descendants of U.S. immigrants on questions about the role of women in society. We then use data on around 6,000 small business firms from 17 countries and find that in high-gender-bias countries, female entrepreneurs are more likely to opt out of the loan application process and to resort to informal finance, even though banks do not appear to actively discriminate against them. These results are not driven by credit risk differences between female- and male-owned firms or by any idiosyncrasies in the set of countries in our sample