Two alternative research hypotheses concerning how small business lending affects bank profitability are tested. The specialization hypothesis argues for higher profitability than other banks due to increased focus on small business lending, whereas the diversification hypothesis Two alternative...

Previous research on relationship lending has paid very little attention to the role of trust. Trust might be ex-pected to reduce agency costs, perceived credit risk and thus the request for personal collateral. Trustworthiness is associated with three attributes of SME owner/managers’:...

Private firm financing, given the far-reaching importance of non-publicly traded companies for global output and employment, is still a relatively underexplored area. Since the seminal work of Petersen and Rajan (1994), only a small branch of research into private firms' cost of debt has been...