The rightmost columns of Table 1 show the status of program participation at the time of the 2004 survey. Participation status is characterized as: (1) currently participating in a program, (2) participated in the past and present, and (3) participated in the past. The first category of current participation is relatively small as compared to the other two categories – those that had used programs in the past – a figure which augurs well for getting firm performance data over the post-program period long enough for the potential impacts of program participation to be realized.

A total of 197 out of the 207 establishments in the treatment group provided usable information on the year they started using each program. These date variables were used to define a first-year-of-program-use variable and identify pre-program and post-program years in the ENIA panel. This was straightforward to do for treatment firms that only participated in one program; for firms using multiple programs, this variable was created by comparing the year of participation for all programs reported and selecting the earliest year of participation irrespective of the specific SME program. 10 firms in the treatment group reported first-year dates that preceded 1992, the first year of the ENIA panel, and were dropped since no pre-program information on these establishments are available; two others reported first-year-of-participation dates of 1992. The rest of the treatment group reported dates between 1994 and 2004, 58 between 1992 and 1999, and 127 between 2000 and 2004.<sup>8</sup> For both these latter groups, multiple years of information were available for both the pre-program and post-program periods (in some cases, up to 10 years of post-program information).

Table 2 shows the distribution of the treatment and control group observations in the linked ICS-ENIA panel. Out of 7,292 year-firm observations, 4,772 are for the control group that reported never having participated in any SME programs, and 2,520 are for firms in the treatment group that used one or more programs. The rightmost two columns refer to the treatment group with year-of-first-participation information which was used to define a post-program indicator variable with a value of 0 for all years prior to the first-year-of-participation, and a value of 1 for the first year of participation and all subsequent years. The first column shows the number of year-firm observations in the pre-program participation period ending in 2003, the last pre-participation year for the treatment group surveyed in the 2004 ICS. The second column shows the year-firm observations in the post-program period, with some treatment firms having in excess of 10 years of post-program experience.

# **B. Establishment Characteristics and Outcome Measures**

Together, the linked Chile ICS-ENIA panel data set provides a wealth of information on establishment attributes as well as data on potentially important intermediate (or shortterm) and final (longer-term) outcomes of SME program participation. The data allow us to characterize establishments by their national and foreign capital ownership, geographic location, detailed industry, establishment size, and year in which they started operations.

> 8 This rising trend over time in program use observed in the ICS data is consistent with programmatic data described in Section II of the paper.

11