Financial frictions and the SME investment gap: new survey evidence for Ireland

In this paper, we use novel firm-level survey data on investment expenditure for Irish SMEs to investigate the existence of investment constraints between 2016 and 2018. We model investment as a function of firms’ economic fundamentals and factors affecting firms’ access to finance. We use an empirical version of the traditional fundamental Q model which links investment to the marginal returns to capital. Empirically we deploy a two-stage...