Overlooked benefits of consumer credit growth: impact on formal employment

Gunes Asik

IZA Journal of Labor Policy, 2018, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-35

Abstract: Abstract This paper investigates the role of consumer credit growth and expansion of consumer financial services on the reduction of informal employment in a developing country. I argue that financial services growth should lead to a decline in the share of informal employment given that consumers whose borrowing constraints are relaxed are more likely to purchase goods with consumer credit and more likely to demand formal contracts. I test this hypothesis by exploiting the regional variation in consumer credit growth in Turkey. In order to address the endogeneity of financial services, I employ minority population loss between 1893 and 1935 in as an instrument. The identification strategy relies on the fact that minorities were main users of financial instruments as they were the trading class in the former Ottoman Empire. The results provide evidence in favor of a positive causal impact of consumer credit growth on formal employment, especially on low-skilled labor.

Keywords: Informal employment; Consumer credits; Financial services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D53 E26 F66 G21 G28 J08 J46 J48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s40173-018-0100-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:izalpo:v:7:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1186_s40173-018-0100-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40173

DOI: 10.1186/s40173-018-0100-1

Access Statistics for this article

IZA Journal of Labor Policy is currently edited by Juan F. Jimeno, David Neumark and Núria Rodríguez-Planas

More articles in IZA Journal of Labor Policy from Springer, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().