Determinants of trade credit use by small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada : Determinants of trade credit use by small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada : working paper

The 2004 edition of the Survey on Financing of Small and Medium Enteprises, a part of the Canadian Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Financing Data Initiative (SME FDI), allows us to investigate the trade credit market from a new perspective. [...] In that sense, trade credit is a substitute to bank credit for companies in an early stage, and then becomes a complement in latter stages, because a company would always need to keep the positive signal of trade credit to remain in the banking relationship. [...] Using the size of accounts payable and bank debt to model trade and bank credit usage, they find that the size of total loans affects negatively the usage of trade credit, while the size of accounts payable has a positive impact on the access to the bank loans. [...] By splitting the sample into low-wealth and high- wealth groups based on profits, she finds that the former group uses trade and bank credits 4 Determinants of Trade Credit Use by Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Canada as complements, while the latter group does not require as much trade credit measured by the two following ratios: accounts payables to sales and loans to sales. [...] Data and descriptive statistics Unlike most of the previous literature relying on the American Survey of Small Business Finances (SSBF), we use the Survey on Financing of Small and Medium Enterprises 2004, a part of the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Financial Data Initiative (SME FDI), which targets Canadian SMEs and investigates their financing behaviour.2 The main objective of this survey, 2