تاثیر مالی مبتنی بر بازار در شکست های SME Impact of market-based finance on SMEs failure

1. Introduction Access to finance for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) is a perennial problem for policy makers, and thus an area worthy of scholarly debate. For several reasons, access to external finance is unanimously considered to be the most important factor hindering SMEs growth, development (e.g. Beck and Demirguc-Kunt, 2006; Ardic et al., 2012), and potentially their failure. Several reasons such as insufficient collateral, poor creditworthiness, short/no credit history, underdeveloped bank-borrower relationships, high transaction costs, and information asymmetry, contribute toward the difficulty that they face in obtaining commercial bank financing, especially long-term borrowings. This problem became more severe with the unfolding of the financial crisis toward the end of 2007. During the crisis period, SMEs suffered from severe credit constraints and many had to rely on trade credits to meet their financing needs (Carbó‐Valverde et al., 2016). Belgian SMEs with a large proportion of long-term debt maturing at the beginning of the crisis faced difficulties in renewing their loans due to the negative credit supply shock, and thus were left underinvested (Vermoesen et al., 2013). This crisis also had a significant detrimental impact on the ability of innovative SMEs to access external finance (Lee et al., 2015). Further, empirical evidence also suggests that the increasing market power of banks leads to higher credit constraints for SMEs (Love and Martínez Pería, 2015; Ryan et al., 2014), and thus a complementary source to traditional bankbased financing for SMEs might be an appropriate alternative choice. Considering the limited use of alternative sources of financing by SMEs (Berger and Udell, 2006), efforts are being made to understand the factors affecting their participation in capital markets (see Bongini et al., 2017) and make their financial structure less dependent on bank financing (see OECD, 2015).