The financial crisis has brought to the fore concerns regarding small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) capacity to access traditional bank lending. Using European firm-level data on SME access to finance since the onset of the financial crisis, we find that bank-lending constrained SMEs are...

This paper considers the effect of financial liberalisation on access to investment finance using firm level data covering 57 developing and transition countries. An index is presented which measures financial market liberalisation along the following policy dimensions: directed lending, credit...

This paper examines the extent to which bank market power alleviates or magnifies SME credit constraints using a large panel dataset of more than 118,000 SMEs across 20 European countries over the period 2005-2008. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine bank market power and SME...

Small and medium enterprises have been shown to rely mainly on banks for funding and, unlike larger firms, rarely have direct access to capital markets. This paper looks at the extent to which SMEs avail of a wider range of funding options and how their use differs across firms and countries....