Evidence about the effect of voluntary audits on the cost of debt is mixed, and there is no research about the effects of mandatory audits and the non-compliance with the audit requirement. Using a sample of Spanish SMEs, where some companies are exempt from audit and some are mandatorily...

Private firm financing, given the far-reaching importance of non-publicly traded companies for global output and employment, is still a relatively underexplored area. Since the seminal work of Petersen and Rajan (1994), only a small branch of research into private firms' cost of debt has been...