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...

The years before the financial crisis saw a dramatic build-up in private debt levels in several countries and this increase was particularly marked in Ireland. In this paper, we look at whether outstanding debt taken out by small and medium sized enterprises in Ireland constrains current...