Acquisition of Additional Equity Capital by Small Firms – Findings from the National Survey of Small Business Finances

Charles Ou () and George Haynes ()

Small Business Economics, 2006, vol. 27, issue 2, 157-168

Abstract: While the importance of venture capital to the growth of small firms has been widely discussed during the past decade, little is known about the acquisition of additional equity capital, especially internal equity capital, by the majority of small firms in the U.S. This paper utilizes the information collected in the Federal Reserve Board’s 1993 and 1998 Small Business Finance Surveys to investigate the acquisition of additional equity capital by small firms. While the importance of public issue markets and venture capital investment in promoting the growth of small dynamic firms cannot be denied, the importance of external equity capital seems to be overstated. Only a very small number of small firms acquired additional external equity capital. It is the internal equity capital, not external, equity, that is one of the major financing sources for most small firms. We found that younger, lower quality firms were more likely to acquire additional internal equity capital than other firms. There appeared to be a “pecking order” of borrowing from internal sources to traditional lenders to non-traditional lenders. In addition, internal equity capital and debt acquired from traditional and non-traditional lenders appeared to be complementary financial resources. Copyright Springer 2006

Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11187-006-0009-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:27:y:2006:i:2:p:157-168

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-006-0009-8

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().