Banks entering an emerging market face a lot of uncertainty about the risks involved in lending. We use a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 short-term loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between January 2000 and June 2005. Of the loans granted, on average 6.0 per cent of the firms defaulted....

The determinants of corporate failure in Italian, Spanish and French small and medium-sized enterprises are investigated in order to find out whether the predictors of financial distress in the countries are the same or not. In order to compare the determinants of financial distress,...