Firms can be credit constrained either because a loan has been denied by the lender or because they decide not to apply for such a loan due to expected rejection. Using a large sample of European small and medium enterprises, we investigate the relationship between gender and credit constraints....

Literature agrees about Basel I and II regulations' inefficiency in improving credit allocation. Recent crisis demonstrates that rating standards fails to generate an efficient asset evaluation system. This is mainly due because of bias in corporate risk estimation. Nevertheless, when dealing...