The impact of corporate characteristics on the financial decision of companies: evidence on funding decisions by italian SMEs.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) represent a large percentage of the corporatetissue of developed countries, but they do not have adequate attention. In fact, variousresearchers have focused their studies on larger and well-known companies. This paperaims to investigate the impact of corporate characteristic on the financial choicesof SMEs, with a specific focus on agro-food micro companies. Access to finance isvital in business start-up, development and growth for SMEs, all with very differentneeds and facing different challenges in terms of finance compared to large companies.The lack of equity invested in small enterprises makes them more dependent on otherexternal sources (e.g. bank loans, overdraft, factoring and leasing). The limitations of thepaper are the result of its very nature: it is a largely conceptual paper. Empirical researchis therefore needed to test and validate the essentially preliminary framework