“…Researchers further confirm that financial leverage is one of the factors affecting the likelihood of either credit constraints or demand for credit ( Nguyen et al, 2019 ). Credit constraints further affect cost of capital ( Rand, 2007 ), innovations ( Gorodnichenko and Schnitzer, 2013 , Zhang, 2021 ), exports ( Jinjarak and Wignaraja, 2016 ), capacity utilization and labor productivity ( Zhang, 2020 , Rodríguez-Pose et al, 2021 ), and environmental practices ( Tian and Lin, 2019 , Zhang and Xie, 2020 ). As such, the testable hypothesis is that firms constrained by access to credit are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.…”