This paper analyzes the main drivers of external competitiveness in times of crisis for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We focus on the Italian experience in the midst of the financial and sovereign-debt crisis, and present robust evidence based on a comprehensive survey of Italian...

This article takes advantage of access to confidential matched bank-firm data relative to the Belgian economy to investigate whether and how employment decisions of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability...

The number of small business start ups that fail may be highly over-estimated according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek (Klein 3/99). Government data is based on employee terminations and 75% of start ups are untracked solo operations. So while this presents a more hopeful scenario, we remain in the...