Financial Crisis and Financing Constraints of SMEs in Visegrad Countries

The paper investigates the access of small and medium-sized enterprises to external financing during the recent financial crisis via non-parametric density estimation. The kernel density estimation is applied on a firm-level measure of financing constraints and evaluates its distribution on a balanced panel of SMEs. For application and cross-country comparison we use panel data on Limited Liability enterprises in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. Our results reveal asymmetric impact of the financial crisis on the ability of SMEs to secure external financing. We identify that there is no sizeable difference in access to credit of SMEs in Hungary and Poland before and during the crisis. In Slovakia and the Czech Republic our results suggest that firms were more constrained during the crisis and their financing constraints did not largely improve after the end of financial crisis. We argue that economic recession was the driving factor of financing constraints in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.