Purpose: This paper explores some of the barriers faced by UK entrepreneurs in raising bank finance to support and grow their businesses, specifically the impact of personal characteristics (ethnicity, gender and education). Methodology/Approach: The approach adopted for the research was a telephone survey of 400 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) conducted by the Barclays Bank small bus...

George Soros’s reflexivity theory is quite compatible with second order cybernetics. Indeed his work shows how to apply ideas in second order cybernetics to economics, finance, and political science. This paper briefly reviews three theories of reflexivity in cybernetics. It provides an introduction to Soros’s version of reflexivity theory and reviews applications in economics and finance. Soro...

This paper explores the booms and busts induced by news shocks in a model economy with financial market frictions. Firms can accumulate capital through either purchase of the existing capital or producing new capital by themselves. Firms need to borrow from financial intermediaries to finance their purchases of capital. With the presence of financial market frictions, firms have to pay an exter...

Despite a large literature examining the effect of litigation on education finance, student achievement and community outcomes, relatively little attention has been paid to the effect of this litigation on teachers’ compensation. This is especially puzzling given the role that teachers unions play in supporting, and sometimes originating finance lawsuits. In fact, union support for finance laws...

A model is developed which allows us to examine the welfare effects of alternative methods of financing access to higher education. Under an extreme specification of the social welfare function, it is shown that it does not matter whether higher education is financed privately or through the exchequer. Under a more general specification of the social welfare function, conditions may be derived ...

This paper investigates the importance of informal finance for Kenyan manufacturing firms. The results indicate that informal borrowing is not an important alternative to other forms of finance. The main clients of informal finance are informal firms and relatively small formal ones, although informal credit is to some extent demanded by firms of all sizes. Most important among the informal fin...

Supply chain finance is an efficient method to solve SME’s financing problem. A core issue is to simulate the supply chain finance system’s real operations. To solve the problem, this paper designs a simulation model for supply chain finance based on Simon’s bounded rationality with multiagent simulation technique instead of absolute rationality. The influences of the behaviors of bank, SME and...

Africa's trade is impeded by poor infrastructure. Inadequate transport infrastructure raises costs analogous to trade barriers, while inadequate power discourages investment. Yet Africa's infrastructure needs greatly exceed its capacity to finance them. There is therefore a need, and an opportunity, for substantial foreign private finance. However, to date, while private finance routinely finan...

Background: Internet finance has grown rapidly in China over the past years. Through introducing internet finance’s “reducing management cost” and “raising capital cost” effects into bank risk-taking model, this paper systematically investigates the dynamic and heterogeneous influence of internet finance on China commercial banks’ risk-taking. Methods: Using internet finance index based on “tex...