After a brief overview of current financing difficulties for SMEs and policy measures to support SME lending during the crisis,this article presents a literature review related to difficulties in SME’s access to finance during the crisis, against a background of a sharp decline in bank...

We assess whether two classes of bubbles occur in the spot price of gold, rational speculative and periodically bursting bubbles, using gold's' lease rates for the first time in the literature as a measures of its fundamental value. This question is of particular significance as these are the...

This study examines the decision by firm owners to apply, or not, for intermediated debt. Based on a sample of SMEs in 9 European countries over the period 2009-2012, we examine firm characteristics, institutional and cultural factors. We focus our analyses on two distinct groups of firms, those...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the trend of discouragement in the small and medium sized enterprise’s (SME) lending market during the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. It detects the extent to which the responses of discouraged firms to improvements in the lending...