In this paper, we study the complementarity between business training and access to financial capital for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Kenya. All participants in a business training program are offered training. One-third of participants are offered loans immediately after training...

This paper analyses the causal effects of weaker dismissal protection on the incidence of long-term sickness ( six weeks). We exploit a German policy change, which shifted the threshold exempting small establishments from dismissal protection from five to ten workers. Using administrative data,...

COVID-19 placed a special role to fiscal policy in rescuing companies short of liquidity from insolvency. In the first months of the crisis, SMEs as the backbone of Europe’s real economy benefited from large and mainly indiscriminate aid measures. Avoiding business failures in a whatever it...

We investigate the replenishment of 102 asset-backed securities (ABS) backed by more than 1.7 million small- and medium-sized enterprise loans. Based on our extensive data set from 2012 to 2017 obtained from the first and only central loan-level repository for ABS in Europe, we reveal that loans...