Capital Access

This book examines access to capital by young and small businesses. The purpose of the investigation is to gain a better understanding of access to capital by young firms and how the recent economic and financial crisis has affected their access to financial capital, especially among firms owned by women and minorities and firms that are high tech in nature. In light of the key role in small business finance played by financial institutions, this book pays disproportionate attention to access of bank loans. Although these issues are important, research has traditionally been limited by a lack of appropriate data. A primary obstacle has been the absence of representative samples of small businesses that contain detailed descriptions of their access to financing. The primary source of data on this question, the Federal Reserve Survey of Small Business Finances, was discontinued in 2003, and is thus unavailable for studying the effects of the financial crisis on small businesses. A second obstacle has been the tendency of researchers to analyse data on cross sections of small businesses of varying ages and sizes at a single point in time. While the findings from these snapshots have been valuable to scholars and policy-makers, they have also been limited. Because they are static, these snapshots do not capture the ways in which small business financing unfolds over the life cycle of the firm and changes over time. This book attempts to overcome these obstacles by examining the effects of the changing financial environment generally and the economic crisis specifically, on access to capital by small businesses over the 2004 through 2010 period, controlling for business and owner characteristics.