【正文】
es that have threatened credit availability to small business in Asia and elsewhere, and the growing use of the entrepreneurial alternative for those who have been displaced by corporate restructuring in the . Acpanying this heightened popular interest in the general area of small business has been an increased interest by policy makers, regulators, and academics in the nature and behavior of the financial markets that fund small businesses. At the core of this issue are questions about the type of financing growing panies need and receive at various stages of their growth, the nature of the private equity and debt contracts associated with this financing, and the connections and substitutability among these alternative sources of finance. Beyond this interest in the microfoundations of small business finance is a growing interest in the macroeconomic implications of small business finance. For example, the impact of the .“ credit crunch” of the early 1990s and the effect of the consolidation of the banking industry on the availability of credit to small business have also been the subject of much research over the past several years. Similarly, the “credit channels” of moary policy mechanisms through which moary policy shocks may have disproportionately large effects on small business funding has generated considerable analysis and debate. Other key issues, such as the link between the initial public offering (IPO) market and venture capital flows, prudent man rules regarding institutional investing in venture capital, and the role of small firm finance in financial system architecture are just beginning to attract research attention. The private markets that finance small businesses are particularly interesting because they are so different from the public markets that fund large businesses. The private equity and debt markets offer highly structured, plex contracts to small businesses that are often acutely informationally opaque. This is in contrast to the public stock and bond markets that fund relatively informationally transparent large businesses under contracts that are more often relatively generic. Financial intermediaries play a critical role in the private markets as information producers who can assess small business quality and address information problems through the activities of screening, contracting , and monitoring. Intermediaries screen potential customers by conducting due diligence,