یک چهارچوب مفهومی کامل تر برای تامین مالی شرکتهای کوچک و متوسط

We propose a more complete conceptual framework for analysis of SME credit availability issues. In this framework, lending technologies are the key conduit through which government policies and national financial structures affect credit availability. We emphasize a causal chain from policy to financial structures, which affect the feasibility and profitability of different lending technologies. These technologies, in turn, have important effects on SME credit availability. Financial structures include the presence of different financial institution types and the conditions under which they operate. Lending technologies include several transactions technologies plus relationship lending. We argue that the framework implicit in most of the literature is oversimplified, neglects key elements of the chain, and often yields misleading conclusions. A common oversimplification is the treatment of transactions technologies as a homogeneous group, unsuitable for serving informationally opaque SMEs, and a frequent misleading conclusion is that large institutions are disadvantaged in lending to opaque SMEs.

The availability of external finance for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is a topic of significant research interest to academics and an important issue to policy makers around the globe. The conceptual framework to which most of the current research literature adheres has been quite helpful in understanding the institutions and markets that provide funds to SMEs in developed and developing nations. This framework has also provided insights into the effects of policies that affect access to funding by creditworthy SMEs in these nations. However, we argue that the current framework is oversimplified, and neglects key elements of the financial system that affect SME credit availability. We propose a more complete framework in which lending technologies play a key role as the conduit through which government policies and national financial structures affect SME credit availability. We define a lending technology as a unique combination of primary information source, screening and underwriting policies/procedures, loan contract structure, and monitoring strategies/mechanisms. An important oversimplification in the current framework is the way that lending technologies are often categorized into two types: transactions lending that is based primarily on “hard” quantitative data and relationship lending, which is based significantly on “soft” qualitative information. Under this categorization, transactions lending is generally viewed as being focused on informationally transparent borrowers, while relationship lending is seen as used for opaque borrowers. In our view, this characterization is fundamentally flawed. Transactions lending is not a single homogeneous lending technology. There are a number of distinct transactions technologies used by financial institutions, including financial statement lending, small business credit scoring, asset-based lending, factoring, fixed-asset lending, and leasing. While financial statement lending is focused on transparent borrowers, these other transactions technologies are all targeted to opaque borrowers. Recognition of this heterogeneity among transactions technologies and its impact on credit availability to opaque borrowers is often missing from the academic literature. Our framework specifies a causal chain from government policies to a nation’s financial institution structure and lending infrastructure. These financial structures, in turn, significantly affect the availability of funds to SMEs by determining the feasibility and profitability with which different lending technologies may be deployed. Financial institution structure refers to the market presence of and competition among different types of financial institutions and lending infrastructure refers to the rules and conditions that affect the ability of these institutions to lend. The extant research literature often neglects key elements of this causal chain, which may yield misleading research and policy conclusions. To illustrate, consider the recent research on financial institution size, one dimension of financial institution structure. A common finding is that large institutions have a comparative advantage in transactions lending to SMEs based on hard information, while small institutions have a comparative advantage in relationship lending based on soft information. A policy implication that might at first blush seem reasonable is that the financial institution structure must include a substantial market share for small institutions to meet the demands of informationally opaque SMEs, since large institutions rely on hard information for their transactions lending technologies. While the current conceptual framework is likely correct in associating large institutions with transactions technologies, the inference that large institutions are disadvantaged in lending to opaque SMEs is flawed. Large institutions deliver credit to many types of opaque SMEs through the transactions lending technologies that specifically address problems of informational opacity using hard information. For small business credit scoring, large institutions use hard information on the SME and/or its owner obtained from credit bureaus to infer future loan performance; for asset-based lending, these institutions use valuations of the assets pledged as collateral to evaluate repayment prospects; for factoring, they focus on the quality of the accounts receivable purchased; for fixed-asset lending and leasing, large institutions look to the valuations of the fixed assets that are pledged as collateral (fixed-asset lending) or directly owned by the institution (leasing). Thus, when informative financial statements are not available, institutions are often able to use other types of hard information to assess repayment prospects. Similar arguments apply to potentially misleading conclusions based on the current framework about other dimensions of a nation’s financial structures and the policies that affect these structures. Research on SME finance suffers from the problem that the lending technologies are usually not identified. This makes it difficult to test theories that relate financial structures to credit availability for different types of borrowers and to make policy assessments of which financial structures function best in supplying funds to creditworthy transparent and opaque SMEs. The limited findings from studies that identify lending technologies suggest that significant variation in the deployment of these technologies exists across nations – an institutional fact that is not explained by the current conceptual framework. For example, asset-based lending has a significant presence in only four nations, Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US. A goal for our framework is to try to explain a significant portion of the variation in the use of lending technologies with differences in national financial structures. The effects of a nation’s lending infrastructure on SME credit availability through determining the feasibility and profitability of deploying the different lending technologies is particularly under-researched in the literature. This infrastructure includes the information environment, the legal, judicial, and bankruptcy environments, the social environment, and the tax and regulatory environments in which financial institutions operate in a given nation. Lending infrastructures are quite heterogeneous across nations. We show how a nation’s lending infrastructure affects the extent to which each of the individual lending technologies are employed in financing SMEs. Section 2 briefly discusses each of the major lending technologies used for SMEs. Sections 3 and 4 focus on the financial institution structures and lending infrastructures of nations, respectively. We show how these structures may influence SME lending credit availability through affecting the feasibility and profitability with which the different lending technologies may be deployed. Section 5 provides some brief conclusions.

We offer a more complete conceptual framework for thinking about the research and policy issues surrounding the availability of credit to SMEs in various circumstances around the globe. We emphasize a causal chain in which the lending technologies provide the crucial link between government policies and financial structures on the one hand, and SME credit availability on the other hand. At the top of the chain, government policies affect a nation’s financial institution structure and lending infrastructure. That is, policies help influence the market shares and competitive conditions for large versus small, foreign versus domestic, and state-owned versus private financial institutions (financial institution structure), and the information, legal, judicial, bankruptcy, social, tax, and regulatory environments in which these institutions operate (lending infrastructure). These financial structures then help determine the feasibility and profitability with which the different lending technologies can be deployed to fund SMEs. The financial institution structure affects the use of technologies because the institution types have comparative advantages in different lending technologies. The lending infrastructure affects the legality and profitability of the lending technologies. At the bottom of the causal chain, the lending technologies have important effects on the access to credit for creditworthy transparent and opaque SMEs. The different technologies – financial statement lending, small business credit scoring, asset-based lending, factoring, fixed-asset lending, leasing, relationship lending, and trade credit – each involves a different combination of primary information source, screening and underwriting policies/procedures, loan contract structure, and monitoring strategies/mechanisms. The choice of lending technology for a specific creditworthy SME depends on the sources of information available for that firm, as well as the adaptability and appropriateness of the various screening, underwriting, contracting, and monitoring techniques dealing with the firm in its environment. We argue that the framework in the extant research literature is oversimplified and often neglects key elements of this causal chain. In some cases, the literature on SME credit availability has not accounted for or controlled for the presence of alternative lending technologies. A common oversimplification is to treat all transactions lending technologies as a homogeneous group that is not suitable for lending to informationally opaque SMEs. In contrast, we argue that most of the transactions technologies are designed to use hard information other than financial statements to underwrite loans to opaque SMEs. These oversimplifications have often led to misleading conclusions regarding how policies may affect SME credit availability through their impacts on financial institution structure and lending infrastructure. We also review much of the extant research on SME credit availability through the lens of this more complete framework, yielding several conclusions. First, the findings argue against drawing simplistic conclusions from the extant research. For example, the finding that large financial institutions have a comparative advantage in transactions lending technologies and comparative disadvantage in relationship lending does not necessarily imply that large institutions are disadvantaged in providing credit to informationally opaque SMEs. On the contrary, some of the transactions lending technologies used by large institutions are well-suited for funding opaque SMEs. Similarly, there is no simple answer to the policy question of whether a sizeable presence of small institutions is needed for overall SME credit availability. A limited amount of research using US data suggests little concern on this issue, but other research suggests that small institution presence may be more important in other nations because differences in financial structures that may limit the use of some lending technologies. Second, the results make a strong case for taking into account the presence of foreign- and state-owned institutions, as well the presence of large and small institutions and conventional measures of financial institution competition, particularly when analyzing developing nations. All of these elements of financial institution structure may affect SME credit availability through comparative advantages in the different lending technologies. In particular, a greater presence of foreign-owned institutions and a lesser presence of state-owned institutions is likely to be associated with significantly higher SME credit availability in developing nations because foreign-owned institutions appear to have advantages in some of the lending technologies, and state-owned institutions appear to be generally disadvantaged. Third, our investigation strongly suggests that lending infrastructures have important effects on SME credit availability. “Better” lending infrastructures may significantly improve SME credit availability through facilitating the use of the various lending technologies. As examples, better accounting standards may help spur the use of financial statement lending, better commercial laws on security interests may facilitate the use of asset-based lending and fixed-asset lending, and greater sharing of information may help facilitate the use of small business credit scoring, although other parts of the lending infrastructure must also be in place for these technologies to be legally and profitably employed. Similarly, “worse” lending infrastructures may appreciably reduce SME credit availability. This may occur if a restrictive regulatory environment constrains the financial institution structure, preventing some types of financial institutions from capitalizing on their comparative advantages in specific lending technologies. The evidence suggests that these effects may be quite strong, particularly when governments restrict the entry of foreign financial institutions and/or maintain large market shares for state-owned institutions. For a framework to be useful, it must have clear testable implications, so that the proposed paradigm may be supported or refuted by the data. Our framework postulates how financial structures affect the feasibility and profitability of the different lending technologies, and the effects of these technologies on SME credit availability. This framework has a number of clear testable implications for the links among a nation’s financial institution structure, financial infrastructure, lending technologies employed, and SME credit availability. To the extent that (a) differences in financial structures across nations explain a significant portion of the observed variation in the use of different lending technologies; and (b) these different technologies explain a significant portion of the observed variance in SME credit availability, the framework would be supported. If differences in the use of the lending technologies are not strongly related to financial institution structure or lending infrastructure, or if the use of the technologies is not strongly associated with SME credit availability, the framework would be refuted. While comprehensive tests are best, individual elements of the framework may also be tested. The framework predicts specific associations among the individual elements of the financial institution structure, lending infrastructure, technologies, and SME credit availability. For example, the paradigm predicts that the presence of large banks and quality credit bureaus may facilitate the use of small business credit scoring, which, in turn, may be efficiently used to lend to some opaque SMEs. Findings confirming these individual effects would support the framework, while findings of no effects of bank size or credit bureaus on small business credit scoring, or no effect of small business credit scoring on lending to opaque SMEs would tend to refute the framework. A key issue in testing the framework is the identification of the lending technologies. One solution is for researchers to use the existing data sets to separate out and identify specific lending technologies that often have not been identified in prior research. A small number of prior studies have identified the use of small business credit scoring, asset-based lending, and factoring, but with some effort, more technologies may be identified. A potentially more fruitful long-run future solution would be to structure new and periodically-updated data sets to directly identify more of the lending technologies.