Using state-level data from India over the period 1983–2005, this paper shows a strong negative relationship between financial depth (as measured by credit volume) and rural poverty. Instrumental variable regressions suggest that this relationship is robust to endogeneity biases. Furthermore, financial deepening has a bigger impact on rural poverty alleviation than outreach (as measured by branch penetration). We find suggestive evidence that financial deepening reduced poverty rates especially among self-employed in the rural areas and also supported an inter-state migration trend from rural areas into the tertiary sector in urban areas, consistent with financial deepening being driven by credit to the tertiary sector. Our findings suggest that financial deepening contributed to poverty alleviation in rural areas by fostering entrepreneurship and inducing geographic-sectoral migration.

We study firm recoveries from systemic sudden stops in developing countries, where firms' cash flows suffer exogenous shocks. Contrary to macro studies suggesting that output recovery precedes that of the financial sector, firm-level data shows that only in less than a third of firms, operating cash flows recover without a recovery in external credit, and even these firms have access to other sources of cash. Specifically, firms with high prior short-term debt exposure do experience a sharp reduction in short-term credit but increase operating cash flows during a crisis. Firms with high prior cash holdings experience negative cash flows and deplete their cash holdings. Thus, firms' financial prepositioning predicts recovery in cash flows and is consistent with trade-off theories of capital structure and with precautionary motives for cash holdings. We find no support for the maturity mismatch hypothesis, which predicts that firms with high short-term debt should have harder recoveries post crisis.