Perrin, C., & Hyland, M. (2026). Gendered laws and women’s financial inclusion. World Development, 199, 107234.

This paper documents the relationship between legal gender equality and the use of financial services, using individual-level data from 148 developed and developing economies. The analysis, which combines data from the Global Findex and Women, Business and the Law databases, highlights the existence of a significant and positive correlation between gender equality in the law and women’s access to financial products. The results show that greater legal equality alleviates women’s involuntary financial exclusion. The findings also suggest that prevailing adverse social norms can nullify the beneficial effects of legal equality, and that better implementation of the law can facilitate a stronger relationship between legal frameworks and women’s financial inclusion. 

Saavedra Caballero, F., Tribin Uribe, A. M., & Perrin, C. S. M. (2025). How Laws Promote Economic Opportunities: A Review. Policy Research Working Paper Series, (11268). The World Bank.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature on how legal frameworks, regulations, and rights influence women’s economic opportunities. Drawing on the Women, Business and the Law 2024 framework as a reference point, the paper adopts a life cycle approach to examine how legal frameworks and policies shape women’s roles as economic actors across different stages of their working lives. It highlights strong evidence showing that the abolition or reform of gender-discriminatory laws can enhance women's economic empowerment by shifting both legal constraints and embedded social norms, although the magnitude and nature of these effects vary across contexts. Persistent gaps are identified in key areas such as pension systems, childcare legislation, and protection against gender-based violence. The review underscores that legal reform alone is insufficient: advancing women’s economic opportunities requires a combination of well-designed laws, their effective enforcement, and complementary policies that address informal institutional barriers. Nevertheless, legal reforms can serve as a meaningful first step toward ensuring better economic opportunities for women. 

Behr, D. M., Perrin, C. S. M., Hyland, M. C., & Trumbic, T. (2024). Empowering change: Assessing the role of democracy, civil society, and women’s rights groups in advancing legal gender equality (Policy Research Working Paper No. 10788). The World Bank. 

This paper explores the role that a country’s political economy, civil society organizations, and women’s rights groups play in advancing legal gender equality. The paper draws on the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law time-series data, which assesses women’s legal rights across eight domains of their lives, five decades, and 190 economies. The results reveal that higher levels of democracy and a more active civil society are positively associated with advances in legal equality between men and women. The analysis also reveals that, beyond an active civil society more broadly, women’s rights groups specifically are a key ingredient for successfully advancing legal gender reforms. The paper shows that both democracy and civil society play a more prominent role in removing legal restrictions that are placed on women than they do in ensuring rights to enabling provisions, such as the right to maternity leave, and that women’s rights groups seem to be particularly important in this area. Moreover, an active civil society may be more effective in advancing reform in more democratic countries, suggesting that bottom-up and top-down channels are more impactful when operating in tandem. 

Bertrand, J., & Perrin, C. (2022). Girls Just Wanna Have Funds? The effect of women-friendly legislation on female-led firms’ access to credit. International Review of Law and Economics, 72, 106101. 

Does a women-friendly legal environment help women overcome discrimination in credit markets? By examining antidiscrimination laws and their implications for women-led businesses' access to credit in 124 countries, the current study differentiates an effect on discouragement (i.e., not asking for credit when they need it, demand side) and an effect on the probability that they obtain credit (supply side). Legal protections are associated with lower discouragement for women-led firms, but they do not support the attainment of more credit. We demonstrate that enforcement efforts dramatically amplify the effect of women-friendly laws on self-restrictions in terms of credit and enable women-led firms to access more credit. Women are sensitive to the legal environment in which they operate, while banks need strong incentives to change their behavior. This effect is notable with regard to rational discouragement and prevails among smaller firms and in high-income countries. These results are robust to several tests. 

Perrin, C., Léon, F., & Osei-Tutu, F. (2026). Seeing risk, seizing opportunity: How perceived political instability affects firm investment. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 241, 107382. 

Does firm managers’ perception of political instability influence firms’ investment decisions? Using a large firm-level survey data of over 147,000 firms operating in 153 countries, we find evidence that a higher perception of political instability is positively related to firms’ investments. This effect is observed both on the extensive margin (likelihood to invest) and intensive margin (amount invested) and for investment in both land and equipment. Perception of political instability also influence how firms finance their investments: firms hold more cash on hand and borrow more from banks when they perceive political instability to be high. We also document that this effect is only observable for small and medium enterprises and those operating in less democratic regimes. The actual level of political instability in a country, however, has no effect on firm investment. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. 

Perrin, C., & Weill, L. (2024). Girls will be girls? The gendered effect of economic policy uncertainty on corporate investment. Applied Economics, 56(9), 997-1011. 

We examine the effect of CEO gender on the relationship between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and corporate investment. Using the newspaper-based EPU index developed by Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016), we perform an empirical investigation on firm-level data of more than 38,000 firms from eight European countries for 2010–2019. We find evidence that higher EPU is associated with higher corporate investment. However, we show that this beneficial effect of economic policy uncertainty is lower when the firm CEO is a woman. We explain this finding by the higher risk aversion of women relative to men. Our work contributes to the debate on the impact of EPU on firm corporate decisions by bringing upfront the influence of CEO gender. 

Bertrand, J., & Perrin, C. (2025). Does corporate political activity (really) reduce borrower discouragement? The paradox of women-led firms. Journal of Financial Services Research. Advance online publication. 

In this study, we use data from 22,822 women-led firms across 50 countries spanning 2010 to 2020 to challenge the belief that corporate political activities facilitate credit access. We demonstrate that CPAs do not improve access to credit for women-led firms. Furthermore, we provide evidence that these results hold in legal, social, and cultural environments that are unfavorable to women, particularly if they display stronger discrimination. Our findings support the hypothesis that women get more discouraged about credit access because their CPAs provide them with knowledge of the discrimination they face. Our results hold across various robustness checks. 

Perrin, C., & Weill, L. (2022). No man, No cry? Gender equality in access to credit and financial stability. Finance Research Letters, 47, 102694. 

Literature has found that women outperform men in terms of loan repayment. We can therefore question whether more gender equality in access to credit fosters financial stability. We test this hypothesis using cross-country data on financial inclusion from the World Bank's Global Findex database and bank-level data on financial stability. We perform regressions at the bank level to check the existence of a relation between the female-to-male ratio of access to credit and financial stability. We find evidence of a negative relation between the gender gap in access to credit and financial stability. Therefore our findings support the view that enhancing access to credit for women relative to men is beneficial for financial stability. 

Bertrand, J., Burietz, A., & Perrin, C. (2022). Just the two of us, we can (’t) make it if we try: Owner-CEO gender and discouragement. Economics Letters, 216, 110596. 

Research suggests that women are more discouraged from applying for a loan than men. Using cross-country data, we find that discouragement prevails only among woman-led firms with a higher share of woman owners, challenging the trend to promote gender diversity.

Perrin, C., Bertrand, J., & Klein, P. O. (2023). Women self-perception and access to credit: The power of role models. Finance Research Letters, 58, 104426. 

This study demonstrates how female role model encourages women-led firms to apply for a credit. Employing a sample of 29,157 firms from 112 countries between 2009 and 2020, our results indicate that the exposure to a female political leader offsets the likelihood for woman-led firms to be discouraged. This is explained by reduced emotional barriers to apply for a credit and is function of the personal status of the role model and its proximity with the female CEO. 

Bertrand, J., & Perrin, C. (2025). Microfinance et autonomisation des femmes : opportunités et limites. Revue d’économie financière, 157(1), 155–163.

Cet article propose une revue de la littérature existante sur l’impact de la microfinance sur l’autonomisation des femmes. À travers l’examen de divers travaux académiques, il met en exergue les bénéfices potentiels de la microfinance, notamment en matière d’indépendance financière et de pouvoir décisionnel des femmes. Cependant, il souligne également les limites et les défis, tels que le surendettement et les normes patriarcales, pouvant restreindre l’efficacité de ces programmes.