Covenants and Small Business Lending: The Finnish Case

This study examines the use and determinants of covenants in Finnish small firms' loans. The results show that 72 of the 642 loan contracts examined include at least one covenant. Negative covenants are more common than affirmative covenants in our sample. We use loan characteristics, firm characteristics, and bank relationship variables to explain the use of covenants. Our results suggest that loans with real estate collateral are less likely to contain covenants than loans with other types of collateral. Larger firms are more likely to offer covenants, while the inverse holds for manager-owned firms. Firms with high corporate leverage, a high level of investments and a high sales growth rate offer covenants more often than other firms. Bank relationship length, changes of main bank and interbank competition also affect the use of covenants.     

Bundling governance mechanisms to efficiently organize small firm loans

Bank loans are a common source of financing for small firms. While scholars have examined specific conditions that affect small firm loan approval and interest rates, practical questions remain about how these loans are structured to address characteristically acute challenges from asymmetric information. This paper suggests collateral, reputation, and relationship banking each perform unique exchange-organizing tasks, and that small firms systematically use them in predictable combinations. A multiple discriminant analysis of 796 small firm loans suggests four governance bundles are commonly employed in this setting. The implications for managers focus on how loan governance mechanisms are most efficiently bundled together.     

Lending to Small and Medium-Sized Firms: Is There an East-West Gap in Germany?

The financing of small and medium-sized firms is important for the catching-up of the East German to the West German economy since reunification. We explore whether it is restricted by unfavorable bank loan terms, using bank-survey data on lending decisions to small and medium-sized firms. A comparison of the terms of lending between the former East German and West German states yields a lending gap given by higher loan prices and collateral requirements in East Germany. This gap can be explained by differences in credit risks and lending strategies of banks.     

Lending to small businesses: the role of loan maturity in addressing information problems

We investigate what determines the maturity of lines of credit to small businesses. Our results provide strong support for the hypothesis that shorter loan maturities serve to mitigate the problems associated with borrower risk and asymmetric information that are typical of small business lending. We find that maturity is shorter for firm owners that have poor credit histories, are older, and less experienced, and for firms that are more informationally opaque. Supporting the notion that collateral and maturity are substitute mechanisms in mitigating agency problems, we also find strong evidence that maturity increases with collateral pledges, that personal collateral is associated with longer maturities than business collateral, and that collateral types that better mitigate agency problems reduce the sensitivity of loan maturity to informational asymmetries and risk. Finally, while it is argued that relationship lending may mitigate information asymmetry, we find no relation between loan maturity and stronger firm-creditor ties.

Effect of climate-related risk on the costs of bank loans: Evidence from syndicated loan markets in emerging economies

Based on a novel dataset that combined syndicated loans originated in the emerging market economies with greenhouse gas emission intensity data of borrowers, this study examines whether and to what extent banks in these emerging markets have factored in climate transition risk in their lending decisions. On loan pricing, our results suggest that banks in these emerging markets have started to price-in climate transition risk for loans to emissions-intensive sector since the Paris Agreement. This could reflect their increased awareness of a climate-transition risk towards such firms. The extent of the transition risk premium is also found to be dependent on the environmental attitude of banks. Specifically, green banks are found to charge a higher loan spread than other banks, when lending to the same brown firm after the Paris Agreement. Apart from pricing a transition risk premium in the loan spread, we find evidence that banks may also consider imposing more stringent non-pricing contractual terms, such as shortening loan tenor and imposing collateral requirement, on brown firms especially when the associated credit risk impacts on these firms are more uncertain.     

Small Business Borrowing and the Owner–Manager Agency Costs: Evidence on Finnish Data

This study investigates the impact that managerial ownership has on loan availability and credit terms. We find that managerial ownership is common in a sample of small and medium‐sized Finnish firms. Our results suggest that an increase in managerial ownership decreases loan availability. The results on loan interest rates suggest that though an increase in managerial ownership initially increases interest rates, the effect is reversed at higher levels of ownership. Collateral requirements increase monotonically with managerial ownership. Overall, the results suggest that banks view that there are agency costs involved with managerial ownership even in small and medium‐sized firms and that this is taken into account when lending to these firms.     

Small Business Borrowing and the Bifurcated Economy: Why Quantitative Easing Has Been Ineffective for Small Business

In the early years following the financial collapse, federal officials and others believed that banks were not making loans to creditworthy small firms, who have accounted for most of the job creation in the United States in recent decades. Acting on this belief, a number of programs were created to increase bank lending to small firms. Overall, however, the data collected since the 2007/8 financial crisis suggest that the explanation for slow loan growth in the small business sector is not a result of supply constraints but rather a result of anemic loan demand among small firms. Thus, recent programs intended to increase small business borrowing through easing credit supply were doomed to fail. The weak demand for credit among small firms is representative of the sluggish performance of the small business economy postrecession, a marked contrast to the robust performance of larger firms and a reflection of a bifurcated economy.     

The latent demand for bank debt: characterizing “discouraged borrowers”

Concerns that small firms encounter credit constraints are well entrenched in the literature, despite widespread empirical evidence that a relatively small proportion of small firms have their loan applications rejected. However, many firms may be discouraged from applying for fear of rejection. These businesses are the focus of this paper. Based on responses to a large-scale postal survey of UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we find that twice as many businesses were discouraged from applying for a bank loan than had their loan request denied. More particularly, we observe a number of distinguishing characteristics of “discouraged borrowers” (relative to applicants). These include: strategy, sector, prior entrepreneurial experience and banking relationships. The implications of our findings for policy and future research are briefly discussed.     

抵押担保、置信威胁与融资选择

我国由于法律环境不完善、信用情况较差等原因形成了大量的银行不良资产.为降低不良资产比率,目前抵押担保在我国商业银行贷款中被普遍地使用.本文构建了拥有不同抵押担保品和自有资本的微观融资主体的借贷模型,通过分析借款者和贷款者的最优选择,推导得出了不同类型企业的最优融资模式,并指出银行为了切实降低不良贷款比率,不能只把抵押担保作为一种贷款前的风险甄别机制,作为借款人违约后弥补贷款损失的补救手段,更重要的是要在监管过程中利用抵押担保对借款人实行置信的威胁,以迫使其努力经营,从而实现有效的监管.文章最后结合模型对我国融资现状作了一些分析并相应提出了几点政策建议.     

Incrementality of SME Loan Guarantees

In many countries, loan guarantee programs are important elements of government policy with respect to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). If loan guarantee schemes are to be effective, a majority of firms obtaining assistance through such a scheme ought not to be able to obtain financing from existing sources: a property known as incrementality or additionality. This paper describes a new approach to measuring incrementality. This work uses a two-stage process to estimate the incrementality of loans made under the terms of the Canada Small Business Financing (CSBF) program. First, a logistic regression-based model of loan outcomes (essentially a credit-scoring model) is estimated based on a large representative sample of SMEs. The resulting model was consistent with prior expectations and exhibited high levels of goodness-of-fit. The model was then employed to classify a sample of firms that had received loans under the terms of the loan guarantee scheme. Incremental loans ought to be classified as “turndowns” by the model; hence the proportion of loan guarantee recipients that the model classified as turndowns is a direct measure of incrementality. For the CSBF loan guarantee program incrementality was estimated (with 95% confidence) as 74.8±9.0%.     

SBA default rates : Selection bias and credit deterioration

This study estimates the effects of changes in the money and capital markets on small business loan failure rates. It develops a lagged model of the relationship between term structure and risk premium variables and the loan failure rates of the Small Business Administration (SBA). Bank credit availability to small firms is shown to be the key factor in relating changes in economic conditions to changes in the SBA loan failure rates. As bank credit availability changes over an economic cycle, there is a movement of the least risky small firms into and out of the population from which the SBA grants and guarantees loans.     

Commitment lending under asymmetric information: Theory and tests on U.K. startup data

U.K. business startup data is used to examine the role of contract parameters in solving the bank's problem of lending under asymmetric information. Margins are found to be a direct function of the probability of failure and an inverse function of security (for given loan size) consistently with collateral being invoked to solve the Moral Hazard problem. Business survival is also found to be enhanced by owner equity inputs (for given debt) again consistent with a requirement for owner financial inputs to enhance (unobservable) effort. Security rises along with loan size and survival chances, a finding consistent with (a) a firm loan size effect (larger borrowers have lower marginal admin cost to the bank), and with (b) positive borrower self-selection (better borrowers offer collateral because they are less likely to experience forfeiture.) Observable business characteristics are found to play an important intermediary role in the solution to the moral hazard problem. More mature proprietors have more experience, business commitment, assets for borrowing and the willingness to use them for loan collateral. Their contract parameters reflect these facts.     

Variance of Firm Performance and Leverage of Small Businesses

We investigate the relationship between leverage and firm performance using small business data from Japan by estimating the effects of leverage on both average firm performance and the variance of firm performance. We find that leverage has a negative effect on average firm performance and a positive effect on the variance of firm performance. This suggests that the problem of moral hazard is severe for highly leveraged firms. However, when highly leveraged firms have sufficient collateral assets, the effects of leverage are positive for average performance, but negative for the variance of performance. This implies that when small firms have sufficient collateral assets, highly leveraged businesses are better performers.     

Identifying successful versus unsuccessful loans held by the minority small business clients of an OMBE affiliate

Successful and unsuccessful loans to minority small businessmen are discriminated using applicant demographic and firm characteristic variables available at the time of application for 65 firms in Cleveland, Ohio. The businessmen studied are the clients of an affiliate of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise and represent a unique segment of the small business community, which has proven to be particularly success resistant. A set of demographic and firm variables are identified that are associated with loan success and can be used to construct a profile of preferred loan applicants. The relative importance of the different variables in discriminating between the two groups of loans and their combined explanatory power is reported.     

中小企业融资中的自有资金信贷机制

银行贷款收益取决于贷款利率和贷款风险两个因素。在贷款利率受到管制时,理性的银行为了实现期望利润最大化,要求企业提供足够抵押来规避贷款风险。我国中小企业由于自身特征及所处信贷环境的原因,银行向其贷款风险大,且得不到足够抵押品,也没有第三方提供担保,这就导致中小企业贷款难现象。因此,我国商业银行应该灵活运用抵押、担保、关系贷款和自有资金多种手段,积极构建中小企业的多层次信贷机制体系。     

Cost of capital and public loan guarantees to small firms

In this paper, we study the determinants of the spread charged by banks under a UK policy intervention scheme, aimed at supporting access to the credit market for small firms through guarantee backed loans. We exploit a unique dataset containing data on 29,266 guarantee backed loans under the UK SFLG scheme over the period 2000 to 2005. Results suggest that lower spreads are offered for loans of larger amounts and higher durations, for service firms, for larger firms, and for those located in the most advanced regions. Higher spreads are applied to high-tech manufacturing firms and to loans issued for working capital purposes. We also find that the presence of other extant debt is associated with a relatively higher spread and that this effect is especially significant for the subset of firms that have reached a maximum debt capacity based on collateralized assets. Further, we also find that the higher the incidence of the publicly guaranteed debt over the total amount of outstanding loans, the lower, on average, the spread. However, an increase in the guaranteed coverage leads to a contraction in the spread only for loans aimed at covering working capital needs rather than investments.     

Job generation and new and small firms: Some evidence from the late 1980s

This paper adopts a components of employment change methodology and examines the process of job generation in the late 1980s for three contrasting regions of the United Kingdom. The emphasis in the analysis is on the contribution of new and small firms to regional manufacturing employment growth. The results indicate the important role of new and small indigenous firms in the job generation process, particularly in Northern Ireland, in the period 1986–90. However, the level of displacement associated with these job creations is sufficiently high to cause concern about the longterm sustainability of these trends. The paper concludes by arguing that policies designed to stimulate new firm formation and small firm growth are not in themselves sufficient to promote growth.     

Loan Officer Turnover and Credit Availability for Small Firms

This paper presents empirical evidence on the role loan officers play in facilitating small firm access to commercial bank loans. If loan officers use soft information (for example, assessments of character, information from customers and suppliers) to make lending decisions that would not otherwise be made on the basis of hard information (for example, tax returns or financial statements), then, frequent turnover in loan officers should be associated with an adverse effect on credit availability. This relationship is confirmed empirically using survey data of U.S. small firms in 1995 and 2001, where loan officer turnover is positively related to the turndown rate on the most recent loan application. Although loan officer turnover could be influenced by the turndown rate (for example, an owner changes banks and gets a new loan officer as a result of a recent turndown), its negative effect on credit availability persists under several different tests.