The rest of the paper is structured in the following way: Section II presents relevant theory and previous evidence; Section III discusses the data and descriptive statistics; Section IV explains the methodology; Section V provides the results; and Section VI provides the conclusion. [...] Chakravarty and Yilmazer (2005) complements 4 An Interpretation of Discouraged Borrowers Based on Relationship Lending these results using the NSSBF 1998 by showing that the total number of savings accounts and the number of loans at a potential lending institution affect only the application and acceptance rate, but not the cost of financing. [...] In addition to the usual variables, which proxy for the relationship between bank and SME, they include the following variables that describe the relationship between the account manager and the SME: positive experience in the past, obligation to the partner, willingness to inform and stability of the relationship. [...] Of those, both the positive experience and the willingness to inform play an important role in the decision of the bank to award credit. [...] In this analysis we include variables that account for the length of the relationship between the bank and the SME following Petersen and Rajan (1994).