An empirical investigation of the financial growth life cycle

The key contribution of this paper is an empirical examination of the financial growth life cycle model by combining a number of statistical tests. This approach is significantly different to that traditionally adopted in empirical investigations of SME financing, which is to examine the applicability of theories developed in corporate finance on panel data. Additionally, it presents data on personal sources of finance employed by firm owners, which is typically not available, even in comprehensive secondary databases.