The gender gap in access to finance: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Green management, access to credit, and firms' vulnerability to the COVID-19 crisis

This paper investigates the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis on firms' performance and financial vulnerability. Exploiting longitudinal firm-level data from the World Bank's "Enterprise Surveys follow-up on COVID-19" for 20 European countries, we assess whether green management quality and pre-pandemic credit access difficulties affect firms' ability to withstand the negative impact of the pandemic. Our results indicate that green firms are more resilient to the pandemic shock. In particular, the likelihood of pandemic-induced drops in sales and liquidity significantly decreases as the quality of green management improves. Conversely, prior financing constraints strongly exacerbate the pandemic's impact on firms' performance and amplify liquidity stress and financing problems. Credit-constrained enterprises are not only more likely to experience liquidity shortages and repayment problems, but they also face higher difficulties in accessing bank financing. The COVID-19 crisis has also hampered the beneficial role that green management exerted on access to credit in the pre-pandemic period. During the pandemic, firms with sound environmental management practices do not benefit from improved access to finance and have a lower demand for credit, possibly suggesting a slowdown in their green investment activities.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11187-023-00759-1.

Gender Diversity in Leadership: A Bibliometric Analysis and Future Research Directions

Gender diversity in management has become of increased interest to academics and researchers in the last decades since women and men have different personal and psychological characteristics that affect their decision-making process in management actions and leadership. A female presence has been under-represented on companies’ boards of directors, which affects management decisions and leadership style. This article aims to contribute to the analysis of gender diversity and leadership state of knowledge, conducting a bibliometric review of the existing literature. In this context, we analyze the evolutional research studies published in the Scopus digital library, considering a period of five years, from 2017 to 2021. We focus our analysis on the top 24 cited articles after a wider review of articles published relating to the explored topic (402 articles). Considering the bibliometric analysis done, we then present scrutiny of the state of knowledge on this subject, a summary of the existing gaps, and suggestions for future research.

Environmental performance and firm financing during COVID-19 outbreaks: Evidence from SMEs

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in substantial constraints for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) worldwide. The techniques in which SMEs handle recent crises and the degree to which environmental performance is advantageous when the marketplace experiences an adverse shock is fairly untouched in the literature. To assess this probability, we examine, using data from 6,597 SMEs in 13 developing countries, the effect of firm environmental efficiency on firm financing during the COVID-19 outbreak. We consider three aspects of external financing - bank, non-bank and trade credit - and suggest that it pays for firms to show devotion to environmental obligations in a global pandemic. Our research implies that the trust between a firm and its stakeholders, if it is based on environmental performance, pays off during periods of shock and adversity.