مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تامین مالی بدهی، بقا و رشد شرکت های استارت آپ – الزویر 2018

Introduction

During the past few decades, academic researchers and policy makers have been trying to identify factors that determine success, measured by survival and growth, of entrepreneurial firms. Because of the limited availability of data on young entrepreneurial business ventures, most studies have focused on older, more established firms.1 More recently, the Kauffman Firm Surveys (KFS) have provided a rich source of information on approximately 5000 start-up firms established during 2004 and surveyed annually through their early years of operation.2 Using KFS data, Robb and Robinson (2014) analyze the capital structure decisions of new entrepreneurial firms and find that: (i) start-up firms rely heavily on external debt in the form of loans and credit lines from banks; and (ii) higher levels of external debt at start-up are associated with faster growth in revenues and employment. This study extends Robb and Robinson (2014) by documenting the differential effects on a start-up firm’s survival and growth attributable to the use of external debt obtained in the name of the business (business debt) versus external debt obtained in the name of the firm’s owner and used to finance the start-up firm (personal debt). This distinction is not considered or explored by Robb and Robinson (2014), who pool bank loans granted to the firm with bank loans granted to the firm’s owner(s) to define the external debt. Yet, we find that only business bank debt, and not personal debt, is associated with more successful outcomes for start-up firms. Thus, it is important to consider the form of a start-up’s debt when evaluating the relation between the capital structure decisions and survival and growth of young entrepreneurial firms. Our motivation for distinguishing between business and personal debt financing of a start-up firm stems from a fundamental theory of financial intermediation. The key issue in many external financing models is the information asymmetry between the entrepreneur who seeks capital to finance the firm and the firm’s financier. The entrepreneur of a high-quality firm has incentive to reduce information asymmetry by retaining a high equity ownership stake in the firm (Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Leland and Pyle, 1977). If the firm is capital constrained, it must borrow to meet its capital needs. Diamond (1991) develops a model of bank loan demand asserting that a new borrower chooses to borrow from an informed bank that monitors rather than from an arm’s length lender that does not. This is because banks, through screening and monitoring, play a special role in reducing information asymmetry about a borrowing firm (see Berlin and Loeys, 1988; Diamond, 1984; Fama, 1985; Ramakrishan and Thakor, 1984), which is likely to be especially high for a new borrower. Since firms want to borrow repeatedly, credit record and reputation building through monitored bank contracts are valuable to new borrowers (see, also, Rajan, 1992). Following these arguments, we hypothesize that a high-quality start-up firm is more likely to use business debt and less likely to use personal debt than other start-up firms. Furthermore, young entrepreneurial firms using business debt at start-up outperform no-debt firms; whereas, young entrepreneurial firms using personal debt do not outperform no-debt firms. These hypotheses are based on the premise that business debt is fundamentally different from personal debt in terms of firm screening and monitoring to the extent that business debt is obtained from an informed lender, while personal debt is obtained from an arm’s length lender. When evaluating a business-loan application, the lender primarily evaluates the creditworthiness and performance prospects of the firm. If the lender provides business debt to the firm, then the lender typically will monitor the firm during the life of the loan. In contrast, when evaluating and extending a personal loan, a lender evaluates the creditworthiness of the entrepreneur – not the creditworthiness and performance prospects of the business entity. Consequently, the cost to the lender of underwriting a business loan is greater than the cost of underwriting a personal loan. Prospective lenders may choose to steer lower quality borrowers to personal loans because the lenders wish to avoid the more costly underwriting process associated with business credit, especially when the lender perceives the likelihood of a positive outcome to be low.