Access to external finance is a key challenge for the creation, survival and growth of SMEs. This article delves into the “weak funding” handicap of rural small firms (SEs): the access to bank financing and the substitutive role of trade credit for entrepreneurs in rural areas when they...

This paper studies how access to bank lending differed between family and non-family firms in the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The theoretical prediction is that family block-holders’ incentive structure results in lower agency conflict in the borrower-lender relationship. Using highly detailed...

This report identifies effective approaches adopted by countries to implement the G20/OECD High-Level Principles on SME Financing, welcomed by the G20 Leaders at their Antalya Summit in 2015. It draws on participating countries’ replies to dedicated surveys. In total, 40 countries participated...

SME investment opportunities depend on the level of financing constraints that firms face. Earlier research has mainly focused on the controversial argument that cash flow-investment correlations increase with the level of these constraints. We focus on bank loans rather than cash flow. Our...

To sustain growth in an aging economy, it is important to ease the financing of small firms by bank loans. Using bank internal data of small business loans in Germany, we examine the determinants of loan rates in the period 1995-2010. Beyond characteristics of the firm, the loan contract, and...

We use loan-level data to study how the organizational structure of banks impacts small business lending. We find that decentralized banks ― where branch managers have greater autonomy over lending decisions ― give larger loans to small firms and those with “soft information”. However,...

It is widely recognized that small business is not only an important source of employment but is the genesis of virtually all successful large enterprises. Given their size and characteristic opaqueness, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) tend to be more financially constrained than large firms...

This paper examines the characteristics of financial institutions that provide financing to new firms using a unique firm-bank match-level dataset of more than 3,000 unlisted small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) incorporated in Japan. We employ a within-firm estimator that perfectly...

This paper studies how bank market power affects firm creation in innovative industries. Theoretically, I show that the effect of bank market power is ambiguous. I exploit a 2012 policy intervention in Italy, designed to foster firm creation in innovative industries through public bank...

In this paper, we use the Blinder-Oaxaca method for nonlinear models to decompose observed differences in credit rationing of small businesses between white- and minority-owned firms in the USA. We utilize a representative dataset of small businesses from the Survey of Small Business Finances...