تأثیر ریسک پیش فرض درک شده و کیفیت اطلاعات حسابداری بر تصمیم برای اعطای اعتبار به SMEs Effect of perceived default risk and accounting information quality on the decision to grant credit to SMEs

Introduction The availability of bank financing for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is a topic of significant research interest among academics and a crucial issue for policymakers (Berger and Udell 2006; De la Torre et al. 2010). This interest is driven in part by the fact that SMEs play a key role in the creation of wealth and employment of any economy. In addition, banks are the main source of finance for small firms (Cosh and Hughes 1994). Regardless, a number of papers find that SMEs are more financially constrained than large firms, so they frequently experience problems obtaining both their required levels of bank financing and sufficiently favourable conditions of borrowing (see, among others, Cressy 2002; Beck et al. 2005, 2006). One of the often-cited main factors that hampers SMEs financing is opaqueness, which accentuates information asymmetries (Berger and Udell 1998; Berger et al. 2001; Hyytinen and Pajarinen 2008). In the literature, ‘‘opaqueness’’ is often referred to the greater difficulties SMEs encounter in transmitting reliable information about their real status and performance, so that it is difficult for lenders to ascertain if firms have the capacity to pay (risk of adverse selection) and/or the willingness to pay (risk of moral hazard) (Hyytinen and Va¨a¨na¨nen 2006). In an attempt to reduce the inherent risk when granting credit to SMEs, banks seek to formalize both the information gathering process and the loan officer’s decision process. Application forms are developed to standardize information gathering. Banks provide training to loan officers that conveys explicit criteria that should be used to determine the creditworthiness of the borrower (Bruns et al. 2008). Nevertheless, despite banks’ efforts to homogenize the credit decisionmaking process, as De la Torre et al. (2010, 2288) state, ‘‘SME ratings do not lead to the automatic approval of loans, but they rather provide the basis for the risk analyst to evaluate loans and decide on their approval’’. Thus, it is logical to assume that loan officers play a key role in producing and interpreting information, and therefore, personal, perceptual or psychological variables also matter in the credit granting decision (Toft 2002; Scott 2006).