Abstract Within the international competition of financial systems, Europe faces the question of whether to harmonize regulations towards a bank-oriented or a market-oriented financial system. Except the United Kingdom, all European countries have bank-based financial systems, however with large...

Purpose – The theory of small business finance predicts that ethnic minority‐owned businesses are more likely to be credit constrained in the start‐up process than are native‐owned businesses. In Germany, empirical evidence for this issue is scarce because of missing data. This paper...

Demographic change influences the structure of the entrepreneurially active population, which may affect credit risk and financing conditions of small firms. Using bank internal data of small business loans in Germany, we find that the lending relationship plays a larger role for loan prices...

Using internal data of a leasing company in Germany, we examine the determinants of the probability and use of leasing by small firms. We find that small and young firms are likely to be constrained on the leasing market but use leasing to increase their debt capacity. Beyond contract- and...

Due to opaque information and weak enforcement in emerging loan markets, the need for collateral is high, whereas borrowers lack adequate assets to pledge as collateral. How is this puzzle solved? We find for a representative sample from Northeast Thailand that indeed most loans do not include...