Small business access to bank leverage under crisis circumstances

This article relies on a dynamic theoretical framework to empirically investigate corporate drivers of small business access to bank leverage during the global crisis period. The empirical analysis leads to several interesting results. In particular, indicators of size and tangibility are positively related to bank leverage proxies. Moreover, they are by far more important than those of profitability, growth and earnings volatility in explaining access to bank leverage. These findings lay stress on the need of small businesses, above all, to provide sufficient guarantees when they wish to incur new bank leverage under crisis circumstances. Thus, they contribute to the debate on small business financing at a time when consequences of the global crisis on this category of firms are more and more evoked.