We contribute to the financial constraints literature and the investment-cash flow sensitivity debate by defining a new and simple index of firm level financial constraints for unquoted European SMEs. Firms that are constrained according to our index pay higher interest rates on their debt. An...

This study tests for financial constraints on Ramp;D investment and how they differ from capital investment. To identify constraints in the access to external capital, we employ a credit rating index. Our models show that internal constraints, measured by mark-ups, are more decisive for Ramp;D...

Numerous research papers have used Irish-only data to test for the presence of an investment gap for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this paper, we use cross country firm-level survey data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys to explore the investment patterns of Irish SMEs in a...