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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how entrepreneurs demand for external finance changed as the economy continued to be mired in its third and fourth years of the global financial crisis (GFC) and whether or not external finance has become more difficult to access as the recession progressed.

Using a large-scale survey data on over 30,000 UK small- and medium-sized enterprises between July 2011 and March 2013, the authors estimate a series of conditional probit models to empirically test the determinants of the supply of, and demand for external finance.

Older firms and those with a higher risk rating, and a record of financial delinquency, were more likely to have a demand for external finance. The opposite was true for women-led businesses and firms with positive profits. In general finance was more readily available to older firms post-GFC, but banks …