We review the literature on financial constraints and the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We consider the important role that SMEs play in the economies of Australia and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. We examine the role of financial constraints in...

We use the Federal Reserve's 2007, 2009 re-interview of 2007 respondents, and 2010 Surveys of Consumer Finances (SCFs) to study how small businesses owned and actively managed by households fared during those turbulent years. Even though the surveys contain extensive data on a broad...

Few empirical studies have focused on the interrelationship among ethnicity, religion, caste and female entrepreneurship in India. The latest nationwide census of small enterprises allows us to examine how the socio-cultural status of the female entrepreneurs affects firm performance at...

This study investigates the impact of internal and external research and development (R&D) on the innovation performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in India and Pakistan. Micro-level data was obtained for 3,492 Indian and 696 Pakistani SMEs from the World Bank's Enterprise...

This study sheds light on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) financing and its performance in Thailand. It elaborates on the key sources of finance existing for Thai manufacturing SMEs and their importance for SME performance as measured by technical efficiency, export performance, and...

This work investigates how the export status of the firm influences the patterns of growth at different age classes. We address this research question resorting to a novel set of data that links together the universe of Italian firms and detailed data on export transactions. We find that the...

Small businesses are important to the economic growth of developing countries. The paper evaluates the causal effect of reducing bureaucracy and the tax burden on small manufacturing firms in Brazil. The identification explored the discontinuity among firms next to the eligibility threshold...

The relationship of firm size and age to its growth and survival differs according to whether size is measured by sales or employment. Using a large and representative dataset of Greek firms over the period 1999-2014, we find the following patterns. Controlling for age, there is a strong...

This paper uses firm level data from the Flash Eurobarometer 421 survey conducted in June 2015 in 34 European countries to investigate the link between having a website and international firm activities in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). We find that firms which are present in the web...

Participation in global value chains (GVCs) can be a pathway for economic development. It is associated with growing productivity, exporting more sophisticated products and a less concentrated export basket (Kowalski et al., 2015). However, it is often argued that these benefits accrue mainly to...