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Capital Structure of Growing Small Firms: A 12-Country Study on Becoming Bankable

Rein Peterson is Magna International Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada, and is currently on sabbatical leave as a senior research fellow at the National Centre for Management Research and Development at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Joel Shulman is Assistant Professor of Finance at Babson College, Massachusetts, USA. In this paper they examine financing problems reported in 4,400 interviews conducted in 12 countries-six developed and six developing. The data was originally collected for the 1984 International Small Business Congress in Amsterdam by SKIM Industries Market Research of Rotterdam, Netherlands. The results of the study indicate that a 'finance gap' may indeed exist among many firms in the less developed countries and in fact may be quite severe. The gap seems to exist, albeit to a lesser extent, among young/small firms in developed countries. It seems apparent that while asymmetric information and agency cost theories help describe part of the results, firms in less economically developed countries also suffer from other more fundamental problems.