The Labor Market Effects of Loan Guarantee Programs

Abstract

We investigate the labor market effects of a loan guarantee program targeting French SMEs in the midst of the financial crisis. Exploiting worker-level panel data and differences in regional treatment intensity in a border discontinuity design, we find that the program has a significant and persistent positive impact on workers' employment and earnings trajectories, in particular for those initially employed in high-unemployment areas. However, the program dampens workers' reallocation towards productive firms, especially for workers with high earnings capacity. In the aggregate, the program appears to be revenue-positive for the government, as the savings in unemployment benefits outweigh the losses from the defaults of guaranteed loans, and the number of jobs preserved by the program is of comparable magnitude as the number of workers prevented from moving to a more productive firm.