In this project we will pursue the goals that were set in the first part of the DFG-project. It includes a detailed comparison of financing terms for small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany and the USA. To this end, the gathered primary data and comparable data of the US Small Business Administration will be used. Against this background of institutional discrepancies between the German and US American funding system we intend to gain new insights on the extent of and the decisive factors of financing constraints. In this framework, the latest theoretical models will be developed further and reviewed in terms of micro-econometrics. The second aim is the refinement of structural approaches for the description of investment and innovation behaviour. The main objective will be the inclusion of fiscal framework conditions and the use of new (inter alia robust) methods of estimation in order to review the findings on financing constraints which have been obtained thus far. A company panel from the Bundesbank's statistics on corporate balance sheets will serve as data basis.