The guaranteed lending progams of the Small Business Administration (SBA) are large and growing rapidly. The SBA's fiscal year 2009 Performance Budget call for 28 billion (Dollar) in guaranteed loans for small businesses - a new record for the agency. Some critics of SBA programs suggest they do...

The sequence, amounts, and timing of informal and formal support for emerging firms, as wll as the impact on start-up outcomes, continue to be a central issue. Tracking reports from a national representative sample of nascent enterprises indicates that average amount of informal support is...