Small and medium enterprises have been shown to rely mainly on banks for funding and, unlike larger firms, rarely have direct access to capital markets. This paper looks at the extent to which SMEs avail of a wider range of funding options and how their use differs across firms and countries....

The financial crisis has brought to the fore concerns regarding small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) capacity to access traditional bank lending. Using European firm-level data on SME access to finance since the onset of the financial crisis, we find that bank-lending constrained SMEs are...