Current Research Projects
CMRC’s current research programme spans access to finance, credit risk, firm performance, and the design and evaluation of financial policy. The work is grounded in large-scale empirical analysis and focuses on questions of direct relevance to policymakers, financial institutions, and the wider business community.
A central strand examines how constraints on access to finance and under-investment affect productivity growth in smaller firms. Supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, this research analyses the full investment process within SMEs—from opportunity identification and investment decision-making to funding choice and the role of debt and equity markets in shaping productivity, capacity, and efficiency. The objective is to identify how financing frictions influence firm growth and to inform policy relating to business investment and regional economic performance.
The Centre is also engaged in research on government-backed business finance, including the Bounce Back Loan Scheme and the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme. This work examines how scheme design, verification processes, guarantees, and institutional incentives influence default, fraud exposure, and programme performance. Related research addresses business finance forecasting, policy modelling, venture capital markets, high-growth firms, and regional development.
Further projects focus on the performance and dynamics of equity-financed firms. This includes analysis of private equity-backed firms in the UK and the United States, alongside research on the life cycle of venture capital-backed firms in the UK, examining how early-stage external finance shapes firm development, scaling, and survival. A central component of this work is the measurement of the equity finance gap, using matched firm-level and deal-level data to identify firms with growth potential that do not access external equity, and to quantify unmet demand for growth finance across regions and sectors.
Another major area of research concerns the modelling of default and insolvency risk across the UK corporate population. Using large-scale firm-level datasets, this work identifies the determinants of financial distress and business failure, with particular attention to the interaction between firm characteristics, lending structures, and institutional context. The findings have implications for credit risk assessment, portfolio management, and the design of financial policy.
Across these areas, CMRC’s research combines methodological rigour with direct policy and market relevance