Economic literature often discusses that in the area of access to finance for SMEs, a market imperfection/failure is not only present during a deep recession but also on an ongoing basis as a fundamental structural issue. The reasons for the market failure relate to insufficient supply of capital (debt or equity) and inadequacies on the demand side. This market failure is mainly based on asymmetric information (in the case of debt: information gap between lender and borrower), combined with uncertainty, which causes agency problems that affect debt providers´ behaviour (see Akerlof, 1970 and Arrow, 1985). .
