We study the effects of the reform of the system of severance payments (TFR) of Italian employees on the cost and the access to credit for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The most direct consequence of the reform is to reduce in the long run the amount of liquid assets available to...

This study analyzes differences by gender in the ownership of privately held U.S. firms and examines the role of gender in the availability of credit. Using data from the nationally representative Surveys of Small Business Finances, which span a period of sixteen years, we document a series of...

This paper investigates whether financial obstacles, and, more generally, financial pressure faced by firms, significantly affect firm growth. For this purpose, we use an unbalanced panel of about 1,000,000 observations for around 155,000 non-financial corporations in five euro area countries....

In this paper we explore the effects of bank-borrower physical proximity on price and non-price aspects of small business lending in local credit markets. Along the price dimension, our analysis reveals that interest rates increase with bank-borrower distance and decrease with the distance...

This study examines and compares characteristics, financing patterns, and performance outcomes of women-owned and men-owned young entrepreneurial firms. Using fully imputed data from the Kauffman Firm Surveys of U.S. start-up firms, we first examine the differences in firm and owner...

We use data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys to test the importance of governance to the availability of credit. We model the credit-allocation process for SMEs in three steps. Based upon these steps, we classify small businesses into four groups based upon their credit needs – firms...

This study analyzes differences by gender in the ownership of privately held U.S. firms and examines the role of gender in the availability of credit. Using data from the nationally representative Surveys of Small Business Finances, which span a period of sixteen years, we document a series of...

Based on a sample of 71,000 balance sheets of Austrian firms during 1989-1996 we can show that higher financing costs of small firms are a consequence of higher risk and larger debt burden of small firms in comparison with large firms. In the empirical analysis we partitioned the data in groups...

We provide broad-based evidence of a firm size premium of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Europe after the Global Financial Crisis. The TFP growth of smaller firms was more adversely affected and diverged from their larger counterparts after the crisis. The impact was progressively...

The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate corporate debt ratios by size classes in Continental Europe. Evidence is given on a sample of firms in manufacturing industry for ten European countries, all of them being in Euroland apart from Denmark (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France,...