Professor Robert Cressy

Robert Cressy, who held Professorial positions at the Universities of Hull and Cass (now Bayes) Business School before moving to a Chair at the University of Birmingham in 2006, is a specialist in small business finance and survival, but has also published significant papers in the areas of venture capital and private equity.

His contributions include over 40 academic papers, 40 book chapters and numerous conference presentations in these areas. He has been, during a long career, located in the top 11 percent of cited authors on the SSRN website. His early seminal paper in The Economic Journal, “Are business startups debt-rationed?” argues that the main constraint on small business bank funding is not finance but human capital.

This was followed by his much-cited 2006 paper in Small Business Economics, “Why do most firms die young?”, which provides a theoretical explanation for small business failure based on research conducted under an ESRC grant. It concludes that firms’ failure to grow and diversify accounts for the skewed distribution of failure rates across business lifetimes. 

His 2018 empirical paper (with Bonnet) on SME failure exploded many of myths in the academic literature on survival by using a very large panel dataset to vitiate bias arising from the use of small cross-sectional and time series data dominating the literature. He showed, in particular, that credit rationing plays a significant role in business failure alongside human capital and industry factors. 

Since retirement his interest in empirical research has continued and he has made contributions to the determinants of UK economic productivity.