COVID-19 placed a special role to fiscal policy in rescuing companies short of liquidity from insolvency. In the first … months of the crisis, SMEs as the backbone of Europe’s real economy benefited from large and mainly indiscriminate aid … focusing on firms’ pre-crisis financial standing, we estimate the extent to which the policy response induced an insolvency gap …

statistical matching procedure an adequate control group for comparison with the group of venture-backed firms is drawn. The …

on financial stability and the real economy. We investigate the cyclicality of SME lending by local banks with vs …

countries and between decentralised and centralised systems with regard to the SME]credit decision]making process become … significant as savings banks in Germany, at least not for SME finance. Notwithstanding recent initiatives to create a common …

that could improve SME finance are the so-called challenger banks, a type of bank unknown in Germany. These banks differ in …

to SMEs. Short-distance lending not only reduces the financial constraints of (financially distressed) SMEs, but can also … informationally opaque SMEs, meaning SMEs that appear to be very risky on the basis of hard information, by utilising soft information … environment. Cost-cutting measures must be conducted with full awareness of this advantage. With respect to lending to SMEs …