Why do negative credit events lead to long‐term borrowing constraints? Exploiting banking regulations in Peru and utilizing currency movements, we show that consumers who face a credit rating downgrade due to bad luck experience a three‐year reduction in financing. Consumers respond to the shock by paying down their most troubled loans, but nonetheless end up more likely to exit the credit market. For a set of borrowers who experience severe delinquency, we find that the associated credit reporting downgrade itself accounts for 25% to 65% of their observed decline in borrowing at various horizons over the following several years.

We analyze linked databases on all SBA loans and lenders and on all U.S. employers to estimate the effects of financial access on employment growth. Estimation exploits the long panels and variation in local availability of SBA‐intensive lenders. The results imply an increase of 3–3.5 jobs for each million dollars of loans, suggesting real effects of credit constraints. Estimated impacts are stronger for younger and larger firms and when local credit conditions are weak, but we find no clear evidence of cyclical variation. We estimate taxpayer costs per job created in the range of 21,000–25,000.

Financial investment behavior is highly correlated between parents and their children. Using Swedish data, we find that the decision of adoptees to hold equities is associated with the behavior of both biological and adoptive parents, implying a role for both genetic and environmental influences. However, we find that nurture has a stronger influence on the share of financial assets invested in equities and on portfolio volatility, suggesting that financial risk‐taking is substantially environmentally determined. The parental investment variables substantially increase the explanatory power of cross‐sectional regressions and so may play an important role in understanding cross‐sectional heterogeneity in investment behavior.