Appendices A
Details on the Algorithm Built to Track Survivors
A critical stage of the analysis conducted in this paper is the way in which observations are tracked between the two rounds of census data. First, it is important to highlight that raw data are available at the establishment level, which is not, in principle, the dimension at which the finance-growth particular link assessed in this paper develops. We are interested in seeing if broader financial access induces firms to grow—independently of what the firm decides to do with each of its establishments. Moreover, there was no tracking approach in the design of either census round, so tracking survivors based on form identifiers would be impossible at the establishment-level. Then, we rely on information on the RUC (unified taxpayer identifier) code at the company level to collapse both datasets to the firm-level. For establishments without an RUC code (informal in that sense), we assume single-plant firms. Another difficulty in the Peruvian case is that the RUC code existing in 1994 has almost no correlation with the current one. In contrast to the 12-digit current code, the so-called libreta tributaria was a tax identifier of 4 to 8 characters, in some cases including both letters and numbers. Although in some cases the change from one version to another consisted only of adding two new digits at the beginning (“20” or “10” depending on having or not business status) and one at the end, there is not in general an exhaustive public algorithm of equivalences. Thus, building an algorithm to identify businesses surviving, entering or exiting the market during the 14-year period was the first challenge faced in this study. The algorithm relied on three variables for tracking firms from one census to the next: company name, ISIC class and geographical specific location. The strategy consisted first of standardizing companies’ names (i.e., removing variations such as punctuation, accentuation, and capitalization). We then established a ratio of coincidence between a 1994 company’s name and each member of the potential
31