if we were to use the ratio of bank loans normalized by total assets.
To address this problem, we also specify the growth rate of bank loans, which is defined as [(total borrowings in year t − total borrowings in year t − 1)/total assets in year t − 1] as a proxy for Bank Loans.
Guarantee is a dummy variable that takes a value of one if a firm satisfies the requirements for inclusion in the ECG program.
i,t is the error term for firm i in year t from 2006 to 2009. i : is firm is fixed effects.
We regard the observations for firms where the guarantee dummy is equal to one as the treatment group.