Despite its importance for development, long-term finance is particularly scarce in countries with lower income levels. This not only results in unrealized growth and employment creation, but may also undermine a broader shift towards better jobs. After all, many long-term investments comprise investments in labor that have the potential to contribute to improvements in job quality. This paper uses more than 17,000 firm-level observations from 73 mostly low- and middle-income countries to provide first empirical evidence of the extent to which LTF affects the quality of jobs. Additionally, it looks into effects on investments and firm performance. The findings, based on inverse probability weighted regression adjustment, indicate that long-term finance increases the likelihood of formal training by 4.4 to 4.8 percentage points, raises average wage by 4.1 percentage points and the share of permanent employees by 1.3 percentage points. Effects are also significant for investments in fixed assets and process innovation as well as for employment and sales growth. The fact that the positive effects on job quality increase with loan maturities underlines the importance of longer-term finance for better jobs. Despite several robustness checks, it cannot be ruled out completely that unobservable variables affect the estimation of effect sizes.

尽管长期融资对发展很重要，但在收入水平较低的国家尤其稀缺。这不仅导致增长和就业创造未实现，还可能破坏向更好就业的更广泛转变。毕竟，许多长期投资包括劳动力投资，有可能有助于改善工作质量。本文使用来自 73 个主要是低收入和中等收入国家的 17,000 多个企业层面的观察结果，为 LTF 对就业质量的影响程度提供了第一个实证证据。此外，它还研究对投资和公司业绩的影响。基于逆概率加权回归调整的研究结果表明，长期融资将正规培训的可能性提高了 4.4 至 4.8 个百分点，平均工资提高了 4.1 个百分点，长期雇员比例提高了 1.3 个百分点。对于固定资产投资和流程创新以及就业和销售增长也产生了重大影响。随着贷款到期，对工作质量的积极影响也会增加，这一事实凸显了长期融资对于改善就业的重要性。尽管进行了多次稳健性检查，但不能完全排除不可观察的变量影响效应大小的估计。