The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 24 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Borrower's Curse: Optimism, Finance and Entrepreneurship
Abstract
This paper argues that most of the facts characterising small-scale businesses, including high failure rates, reliance on bank credit rather than equity finance, relatively low interest rate margins, and credit rationing, can be explained by a tendency for those who are excessively optimistic to dominate new entrants. Drawing on findings in psychology, we model entrants as relatively naive optimisers. Banks on the other hand are viewed as well informed and efficient processors of information.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism
Akerlof, G. A. (1970) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.2307/1879431 · Cited by 23,016
Credit Rationing in Markets with Imperfect Information
Stiglitz, J. E., & Weiss, A. (1981) · Columbia University · doi:10.7916/d8v12ft1 · Cited by 12,769
Illusion and well‐being: A social psychological perspective on mental health
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.103.2.193 · Cited by 7,814
Unrealistic optimism about future life events
Weinstein, N. D. (1980) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.39.5.806 · Cited by 4,999
Selection and the Evolution of Industry
Jovanovic, B. (1982) · Econometrica · doi:10.2307/1912606 · Cited by 4,515
Good News and Bad News: Representation Theorems and Applications
Milgrom, P. R. (1981) · The Bell Journal of Economics · doi:10.2307/3003562 · Cited by 3,123
Some Empirical Aspects of Entrepreneurship
Evans, D. S., & Leighton, L. S. (1989) · American Economic Review · Cited by 1,992
Collateral, loan quality and bank risk
Berger, A. N., & Udell, G. F. (1990) · Journal of Monetary Economics · doi:10.1016/0304-3932(90)90042-3 · Cited by 1,013
Financial Fragility and Economic Performance
Bernanke, B., & Gertler, M. (1990) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.2307/2937820 · Cited by 926
Too Much Investment: A Problem of Asymmetric Information
Meza, D. D., & Webb, D. C. (1987) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.2307/1885064 · Cited by 879
Cited by
Cultural entrepreneurship: stories, legitimacy, and the acquisition of resources
Lounsbury, M., & Glynn, M. A. (2001) · Strategic Management Journal · doi:10.1002/smj.188 · Cited by 2,329
Slack Resources and the Performance of Privately Held Firms
George, G. (2005) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.5465/amj.2005.17843944 · Cited by 1,254
Managerial Optimism and Corporate Finance
Heaton, J. B. (2002) · Financial Management · doi:10.2307/3666221 · Cited by 1,070
Entrepreneurs' Optimism And New Venture Performance: A Social Cognitive Perspective
Hmieleski, K. M., & Baron, R. A. (2009) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.5465/amj.2009.41330755 · Cited by 983
The effects of entrepreneurship education
von Graevenitz, G., Harhoff, D., & Weber, R. (2010) · Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2010.02.015 · Cited by 868
Metadata
- Authors
- de Meza, D., & Southey, C.
- Venue
- The Economic Journal
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1996-03
- Volume
- 106
- Issue
- 435
- Pages
- 375
- ISSN
- 0013-0133 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1547558188
- Cited by
- 398
- References
- 24
- FWCI
- 4.66
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Borrower's Curse: Optimism, Finance and Entrepreneurship. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2235253
- The paper
- de Meza, D., & Southey, C. (1996). The Borrower's Curse: Optimism, Finance and Entrepreneurship. The Economic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2307/2235253
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.