The literature has documented a positive relationship between the use of credit scoring for small business loans and small business credit availability, broadly defined. However, this literature is hampered by the fact that all of the studies are based on a single 1998 survey of the very largest...

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this...

The cost of health insurance has been the primary concern of small business owners for several decades. State small group health insurance reforms, implemented in the 1990s, aimed to control the variability of health insurance premiums and to improve access to health insurance. Small group...

Small businesses do not share the same financial management problems with large businesses. This paper shows that the source of the differences could be traced to several characteristics unique to small businesses. This uniqueness in turn creates a whole new set of financial management issues....

There is an increased interest in small companies and entrepreneurship among academicians and policy makers. The melting of the cold war and the collapse of the socialist economies of the Soviet bloc, in combination with the interest of the affected countries in imitating some form of...

This paper is a first attempt at differentiating the problems of finance of the privately held small businesses from their larger counterparts. Small businesses, though not concerned with the problems and opportunities associated with publicly traded firms, have different types of complexities,...

The use of traditional risk measurement techniques for small unlisted businesses proves difficult due to a lack of market information. A sample of 209 small businesses in New Zealand was gathered to test the possibility of using accounting betas for risk measurement. While the accounting betas...

This paper models the borrowing decision of a small firm seeking a bank loan when it can optionally hire, at a cost, an independent external auditor to convey its risk characteristics to lenders. The analysis shows that a necessary condition for a potential borrower to prefer having an audit to...

A simple single-period model of entrepreneurial capital structure choice under conditions of informational asymmetry is developed. The uncertain terminal cash flow generated by a business venture is assumed to depend on both the amount of effort provided by the entrepreneur and the quality of...

This essay is intended to begin the elaboration of a theme: the interaction between the observed sizes of firms and their internal decision making procedures. This theme is a major one in the symphony of entrepreneurial activity. The entrepreneur, as the maker and changer of economic and...