
BSE alumni Marta Morazzoni and Andrea Sy (both Economics Class of 2018) received the 2021 Young Economist Award from the European Economic Association and Unicredit Foundation for their paper, “Female entrepreneurship, financial frictions and capital misallocation in the US.”
The paper has also just been published in the Journal of Monetary Economics. (It originally appeared as a Barcelona School of Economics Working Paper.)
“New empirical evidence, highly relevant policy implications”
The EEA Young Economics award committee consisted of Philipp Kircher, Giacomo Ponzetto and Antonella Trigari. They noted that “the paper addresses an extremely important topic, offers new empirical evidence from micro-level data cleverly identifying informative moments, and builds a state-of-the-art general equilibrium model to rationalize the evidence and to provide highly relevant policy implications.”
Read the award committee’s report on the EEA website
Paper abstract
We document and quantify the effect of a gender gap in credit access on both entrepreneurship and input misallocation in the US. Female entrepreneurs are found to be more likely to face a rejection on their loan applications and to have a higher average product of capital, a sign of gender-driven capital misallocation that decreases in female-led firms’ access to finance. These results are not driven by differences in observable individual or businesses characteristics. Calibrating a heterogeneous agents model of entrepreneurship to the US economy, we show that the observed gap in credit access explains the bulk of the gender differences in capital allocation across firms. Eliminating such credit imbalance is estimated to potentially increase output by 4%, and to reduce capital misallocation by 12%.
Key findings
- In the US, female entrepreneurs receive less business funding compared to male entrepreneurs.
- Female-owned firms operate with lower levels of assets, resulting in gender-driven capital misallocation.
- Female-led businesses are nonetheless relatively more profitable and have better credit risk scores.
- Removing the gender gap in business financing is estimated to potentially increase output by 4%.
Connect with BSE authors

Marta Morazzoni ’18 is a PhD candidate at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and BSE. She is an alum of the BSE Master’s in Economics.

Andrea Sy ’18 is a PhD candidate at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and BSE. She is an alum of the BSE Master’s in Economics.