Numerous scholars have highlighted how capital market imperfections largely affect small businesses, which face significant difficulties in accessing external forms of finance and cannot rely on internal finance to sustain their growth (Beck and Demirguc-Kunt, 2006; Berger and Udell, 1990; Carpenter and Petersen, 2002). Financing obstacles significantly hamper small businesses’ growth and competitiveness (Beck and Demirguc-Kunt, 2006; Headd and Kirchhoff, 2007). Small firms are very likely to face credit constraints because of their limited availability of collateral assets to secure firms’ borrowing and their Binformational opacity^ due to the limited financial track records, which prevents banks from evaluating their creditworthiness (Berger and Udell, 1990). Concerns have been raised that the recent financial crisis and the relevant institutional changes that have been affecting the European credit market (e.g., the introduction of the Basel II and III Accords) might worsen lending conditions for small businesses, thus further exacerbating their financing constraints (Scellato and Ughetto, 2010). The difficulties faced by small firms in accessing credit have called for a deeper reflection by policy makers, who have introduced different types of government programs to help small firms gain access to credit lines and loans that would otherwise be unavailable to them (Cowling and Clay, 1995; Cowling, 2010; Cowling and Siepel, 2013; Martί and Quas, 2016; Meuleman and De Maeseneire, 2012; Riding, 1998). While direct governmental credit subsidization programs have rarely achieved the expected success (Zia, 2008), numerous loan guarantee programs that supply government guarantees to banks have been successfully introduced in many developed and developing countries (Beck, Klapper, and Mendoza, 2010; Boschi, Girardi, and Ventura, 2014; Cowling and Mitchell, 2003; Honaghan, 2008; Klapper, Laeven, and Rajan, 2006; Riding, 1998). Such schemes allow for partial coverage of potential losses, so that the government shares with the bank the risk that the guaranteed loans may default, by covering a predetermined percentage of the outstanding loan (Beck, Klapper, and Mendoza, 2010; Honohan, 2010). Moreover, they are typically based upon the Badditionality^ concept, namely, the requirement that guaranteed loans are only issued to borrowers that have exhausted all other sources of funding (Cowling and Siepel, 2013).1 However, there is much agreement in the literature that conventional screening lending criteria are still implemented by banks in the case of loans issued under public guaranteed schemes (Fraser, 2009; Riding, 1998). These public intervention programs differ worldwide in their pricing; risk assessment and risk management practices; in the role played by government; in the lending criteria (e.g. eligible borrowers and lending terms); in the proportion of the total loan which is guaranteed; in the distribution of losses between the lender and the guarantor in case of default; and in the restrictions which typically concern the sector, type of business, or geographic area of reference (Beck, Klapper, and Mendoza, 2010; Honohan, 2010; Ughetto and Vezzulli, 2011).