中小企业融资的问题及对策研究探 (外文原文).doc

Financing of SMEs Material Source：Jan Bartholdy, Cesario Mateus, “Financing of SMEs”.London business review. 2007(9).pp.43-45 Abstract The main sources of financing for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are equity, trade credit paid on time, long and short term bank credits, delayed payment on trade credit and other debt. The marginal costs of each financing instrument are driven by asymmetric information and transactions costs associated with nonpayment. According to the Pecking Order Theory, firms will choose the cheapest source in terms of cost. In the case of the static trade-off theory, firms choose finance so that the marginal costs across financing sources are all equal, thus an additional Euro of financing is obtained from all the sources whereas under the Pecking Order Theory the source is determined by how far down the Pecking Order the firm is presently located. In this paper, we argue that both of these theories miss the point that the marginal costs are dependent of the use of the funds, and the asset side of the balance sheet primarily determines the financing source for an additional Euro. An empirical analysis on a unique dataset of Portuguese SME’s confirms that the composition of the asset side of the balance sheet has an impact of the type of financing used and the Pecking Order Theory and the traditional Static Trade-off theory are For SME’s the main sources of financing are equity (internally generated cash), trade credit, bank credit and other debt. The choice of financing is driven by the costs of the sources which is primarily determined by costs of solving the asymmetric information problem and the expected costs associated with non-payment of debt. Asymmetric information costs arise from collecting and analysing information to support the decision of extending credit, and the non-payment costs are from collecting the collateral and selling it to recover the debt. Since SMEs’ management and shareholders are often the same person,