Acta Univ. Agric. Silvic. Mendelianae Brun. 2015, 63(4), 1297-1302 | DOI: 10.11118/actaun201563041297

Access to Credit of SMEs in the Czech Republic During the Financial Crisis and in the Post-crisis Period

Petr Koráb¹, Jitka Poměnková²

¹ Department of Finance, Faculty of Business and Economics, Mendel University in Brno, Zemědělská 1, 613 00 Brno, Czech Republic

² Department of Radio Electronics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication, Brno University of Technology, Technická 3082/12, 616 00 Brno, Czech Republic

We investigate the impact of the financial crisis on the access of small and medium-sized enterprises in the Czech Republic to external financing. We apply the non-parametric kernel density estimation on a firm-level measure of financing constraints and evaluate its distribution on a balanced panel of SMEs. We focus on financing constraints related to financial health of companies since they determine the commercial banks' lending behaviour. Our results reveal 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 enterprises were financially constrained during the crisis because of reduced cash-flow and cash holdings.

Keywords: financing constraints, KZ index, credit crunch, financial accelerator, nonparametric estimation, kernel density

Grants and funding:

The research in this submission was financially supported by Petr Koráb's junior fellowship project at Austrian Institute of Economic Research, WIFO, by the Brno University of Technology Internal Grant Agency project [No. FEKT-S-14-2177] (PEKOS), by the Czech Science Foundation grant "Financial Crisis, Depreciation and Credit Crunch in CEECs" [No. P403/14-28848S], and by the VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Faculty of Economics, Grant SGS [No. SP2014/115]. The research was performed in laboratories supported by the SIX project [registration No. CZ.1.05/2.1.00/03.0072], the operational program Research and Development for Innovation. We thank Jarko Fidrmuc, Christian Glocker, Werner Hoelzl, Peter Huber, Svatopluk Kapounek, Klaus S. Friesenbichler, Gregor von Schweinitz, Josef Montag, Lucie Režňáková and Zuzana Richterková for useful comments and suggestions. We have benefited from the presentations at the workshop at Halle Institute of Economic Research in February 2014, WIFO extern seminar in March 2014, and at the Enterprise and Competitive Environment 2014 conference.

Prepublished online: September 2, 2015; Published: September 1, 2015  Show citation