Do power outages hurt registered firms’ access to finance in developing countries?

Abstract This paper examines the effect of power outages on registered firms’ access to finance in developing countries, using firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (2006–2024) covering 99 countries and over 120,000 observations. Applying entropy balancing, we show that power outages significantly increase firms’ financing constraints, defined as limitations in access to external finance, and this result is robust across specifications. The effect exhibits substantial heterogeneity across sectors, outage duration and frequency, export intensity, and energy intensity, and varies with key structural conditions. In particular, the adverse impact intensifies in environments with higher bank non-performing loans, while it is mitigated by greater net official development assistance and wider interest rate spreads. We further document that reduced productivity growth and slower sales growth act as transmission channels through which outages exacerbate financing constraints.