【正文】
including the collection of information about the business, the market in which it operates, any collateral that may be pledged, and the entrepreneur or startup team. This may involve the use of information garnered from existing relationships of the intermediary with the business, the business owner, or other involved parties. The intermediary then uses this information about the initial quality of the small business to set contract terms at origination (price, fraction of ownership, collateral, restrictive covenants, maturity, etc.).A contract design and payoff structure is chosen on the basis of the financial characteristics of the firm and the entrepreneur as well as the firm’s prospects and the associated information problems. High riskhigh growth enterprises whose assets are mostly intangible more often obtain external equity, whereas relatively low risklow growth firms whose assets are mostly tangible more often receive external debt for reasons explored below. Finally, in order to keep the firm from engaging in exploitive activities or strategies, the intermediary monitors the firm over the course of the relationship to assess pliance and financial condition, and exerts control through such means as directly participating in managerial decision making by venture capitalists or renegotiating waivers on loan covenants by mercial banks. This paper has several motivations. The first is to provide as plete a picture as possible of the nature of the private equity and debt markets in which small businesses are financed based on currently available research and data. The second is to draw connections between various strands of the theoretical and empirical literature that have in the past focused on specific aspects of small firm finance but often have not captured the plexity of small business finance and the alternative sources of funding available to these firms. The third goal is to suggest extensions to the research in key areas related to the markets, contracts, and institutions associated with small firm finance and to highlight the relatively new data sources available to address these issues. Public focus on small business finance derives both from the spectacular success of some recent entrepreneurial firms and from concern that many small businesses with positive present value projects may not be able to obtain sufficient external finance. Causes for concern include, among others, the recent