论文部分内容阅读
Can entrereneurship help households escape poverty? We examine subjects in urban Hyderabad,India,six years after microfinance–an intervention commonly believed to lower the cost of credit and spark business creation–was randomly introduced to a subset of neighborhoods.We find large benefits both in business scale and performance from giving “seasoned entrepreneurs”–those who started a business before microfinance entered–more access to microfinance.Notably,these effects persist two years after microfinance was withdrawn from Hyderabad.However,any persistent benefits to “novices,” those without prior businesses,are much more meager and generally indistinguishable from zero.A structural model of the production functions of seasoned vs.novice entrepreneurs suggests that marginal returns to capital for the former are 3-4 times as large as for the latter.These results suggest that heterogeneity in entrepreneurial ability is important and persistent; and that lenders entering a new market may be better off by focusing on borrowers at the intensive rather than extensive margin.We also provide some of the first evidence on the relationship between formal and informal credit from an individuals social network.While microfinance crowds out informal finance for the novices,the informal financial relationships of seasoned entrepreneurs exhibit complementarities with microfinance.