This paper investigates how entrepreneur’s characteristics determine debt financing of small manufacturing firms. In particular, we investigate the influence of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, strong and weak social ties, gender, age, and entrepreneur’s educational level on small firm debt...

Banks’ lending decisions to small firms are not based on financial ratios, while suppliers lend to clients with strong sales. So entrepreneurial firms might find it easier to borrow from banks, and rely more on bank lending than on supplier lending. We further find that suppliers are quite...