Abstract

Small and medium-sized enterprises are facing many types of business risks, almost unknown or unimportant for the large companies, where the funding risk plays an essential role due to the importance of the need of the external financial sources for their growth. This paper investigates the impact of a size of the company and an age of the owner on the perception of the funding risk in the segment of small and medium-sized enterprises in Slovakia in response to the restraints in their access to credit finance. The results of the research specify the importance of these factors in determining the scope of the funding risk exposure on Slovak SMEs. The paper is based on the data from the scientific research carried out in 2016 in Slovakia among 438 companies. The data were analyzed by Pearson´s chi-square statistics, which allowed to confirm the existence of the statistically significant dependencies between the chosen factors and the perception of the funding risk. The presented statistical evidence confirms that the size of the company and the age of the owner are significant in relation to the funding risk of a company from the segment of SMEs. Smaller companies do perceive the funding risk more intensively than larger ones. The statistically significant impact of the selected factors on the frequency of bank loans rejection was confirmed only in case of the age of the owner, but not in case of the size of the company, when the entrepreneurs of the age between 36 and 45 declared the highest rejection rate of the loan applications. A surprising finding is that younger entrepreneurs are significantly more self-confident in case of the potentially negative influence of the funding risk on their companies than their older colleagues. The results of the research also confirm the existence of the statistically significant dependence between the selected factors and the reasons for the rejection of bank loans applications. We can declare that a credit rejection is most common in case of younger business owners but is not typical for the smaller companies. In the group of entrepreneurs aged between 36 and 45 years the most frequent reason was related to the negative values of the financial indicators, and in case of the oldest entrepreneurs the most often reasons of the rejection of the loan application were the lack of collateral, poor business plan and negative values of the financial indicators.

Keywords: credit risk, small and medium-sized enterprises, age, size, loan financing, bank financing, external finance, access to finance.

JEL Classification: G11, G32.

Cite as: Kljucnikov, A., & Majkova, M. S. (2018). Funding risk perception by Slovak SMEs: impact of age and size of the company. Marketing and Management of Innovations, 4, 282-297. https://doi.org/10.21272/mmi.2018.4-24

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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