nep-cfn New Economics Papers
on Corporate Finance
Issue of 2012‒07‒29
four papers chosen by
Zelia Serrasqueiro
University of the Beira Interior

  1. Firm Credit in Europe: A Tale of Three Crises By Holton, Sarah; Lawless, Martina; McCann, Fergal
  2. Fixed-income portfolio management in crisis period: Expected tail loss (ETL) approach By Mili, Mehdi
  3. Financing needs of nascent entrepreneurs in Chile: does gender matter? By Gianni Romani; Miguel Atienza; Ernesto Amorós
  4. On the Relevance of Soft Information in Credit Rating: The Case of a Social Bank Financing Small Businesses By Simon Cornée

  1. By: Holton, Sarah (Central Bank of Ireland); Lawless, Martina (Central Bank of Ireland); McCann, Fergal (Central Bank of Ireland)
    Abstract: This paper analyses the effects of the recent euro area economic, financial and debt crisis on SMEs’ access to bank finance. We use a survey on access to finance of SMEs in the euro area carried out by the European Central Bank during 2009 and 2010 to examine the impact of macroeconomic factors on developments in loan applications and approvals as well as changes in credit terms and conditions. At the country level, we identify three distinct aspects of the recent crisis in Europe affecting firm credit through different channels. A weak real economy is found to affect the demand for bank financ- ing. Financial conditions (proxied by the median credit default swap for banks in each country and sovereign yields) predominantly affect the probability of loan rejection and the terms and conditions of credit rather than the demand for credit. We interpret this as evidence of a bank balance sheet channel negatively impacting credit provision. Crucially, the level of debt overhang affects all aspects of SME financing, with suggestive evidence that the effect on credit rejection operates through the bank balance sheet channel, as opposed to being due to the borrower balance sheet.
    Date: 2012–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cbi:wpaper:04/rt/12&r=cfn
  2. By: Mili, Mehdi
    Abstract: The purpose of this study is to develop an efficient strategy for managing fixed-income portfolios in crisis periods. We use the volatility ratio model of Briere and Szafarz (2008) and the Expected Tail Loss (ETL) approach of Litzenberger and Modest (2008). Our methodology is applied to U.S. and European markets of fixed-income products using interest rates at different maturities over the period 2002 through 2010. U.S. portfolio exhibits his optimum with small amounts of interest rates belonging to the short-term strategy and the European portfolio exhibits his optimum with small amounts belonging to the long-term strategy. The results show that the ETL is a better measure of the downside risk than the Value-at-Risk (VaR). For instance, the U.S. (European) portfolio has a VaR of -3.6% (-0.7%) against an ETL of -6% (-0.8%). Moreover, we find that, for these two geographical areas, the short-term interest rates make little contribution to the overall ETL of the American fixed-income portfolio and vice versa for the European portfolio. --
    Keywords: fixed-income portfolio,financial crisis,flight-to-quality,contagion,expected tail loss
    JEL: G11 G15 N20
    Date: 2012
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ifwedp:201233&r=cfn
  3. By: Gianni Romani; Miguel Atienza; Ernesto Amorós
    Abstract: Funding is critical during new firms´ creation and the most sources of funding in the early stages of entrepreneurial ventures are informal investors (Family, Friends, the Founding entrepreneurs themselves, and the foolhardy strangers, also known as business angels). Entrepreneurs in the initial stages are the main users of informal financing, more specifically those denominated according to the GEM definition as nascent entrepreneurs; that is, those who are involved in establishing a business or those who have made the leap from the conception of the business to its actual gestation (Reynolds et al., 2005). Informal investment has come to the attention of researchers, mostly in the United States and Europe, and very scarcely in Latin America. Nevertheless, in recent years there has been a call to study entrepreneurship taking in consideration the perspective of gender (Brush, 1992; Bird and Brush, 2002). In Chile, studies of this nature are scarce. For this reason in order to find out more of how the nascent entrepreneurs fund theirs ventures, the main objective of this article is to explore the gender differences that could exist in the financing needs of nascent Chilean entrepreneurs with regard to: Amount needed to start the business; outside financing expectations, employment creations expectations, socio-demographic characteristics, perception related to entrepreneurship. The analysis is based on a representative sample of the Chilean adult population between 18 and 64 years of age, using data from the GEM from the years 2007 and 2008. Since this is an exploratory study, we propose separating the nascent entrepreneurs by gender and using descriptive statistics and Mann–Whitney U test (non-parametric test for two independent samples). The results show that there are significant gender differences among nascent entrepreneurs with respect to the amount needed to start a business, socio-demographic characteristics, and in some aspects related to entrepreneurship. These results provide a better understanding of the financial needs of nascent entrepreneurs and the existent differences between women and men. These results can contribute to a better design of public policies to support new venture creations taking into account a gender perspective.
    Date: 2011–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa10p1425&r=cfn
  4. By: Simon Cornée (University of Rennes 1 - CREM, UMR CNRS 6211)
    Abstract: Based on a unique hand-collected database of 389 loans obtained from a French social bank dealing with small businesses, this paper compares two predictive models of future default events: the first relies on soft information (SI model), the second on hard information (HI model). The results indicate that the SI model outperforms the HI model in terms of forecast quality and goodness of fit. In so doing, this paper provides further empirical evidence that, when they serve small businesses, small or decentralized banks have a greater ability to collect and act on soft information. This empirical conclusion conveys practical implication for social banks’ internal credit rating procedures, especially in their calibration of capital requirements.
    Keywords: Credit Rating, Debt Default, Small Business Lending, Relationship Lending, Social Banking
    JEL: G21 M21
    Date: 2012–06
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tut:cremwp:201226&r=cfn

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