Mary Ann Bolton Undergraduate Research Award

Award Winner

Recipient of the 2022 Mary Ann Bolton Undergraduate Research Award - Runner-up.

To go to the Mary Ann Bolton Undergraduate Research Award page, Click here.

Year of Award

2022 Award

Document Type

Open Access Paper

Keywords

Businesswomen--Bahrain; Credit--Bahrain; Capital--Bahrain;

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is essential to virtually every economy; however, Bahraini women face many challenges accessing business development. In particular, a major constraint for these women is their access to capital support. In 2020, the government signed a law prohibiting gender-based discrimination in access to credit to help the issue; nonetheless, its effectiveness has yet to be systematically examined. Using data from several sources, I test whether the law significantly affected the gender gap in borrowing for business purposes while controlling for other variables. Importantly, I find that women’s labor force participation is a significant factor in reducing the borrowing gap between men and women, and removing traveling restrictions on women positively affects their labor force participation. These results are robust across multiple regression models. Hence, a culture supporting women’s economic involvement is the foundation for their credit access.

Publication Date

2022

Award Sponsored by

Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa

Faculty Advisor

Brian Warby

Faculty Advisor 2

Evan Renfro

Department

Department of Political Science

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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