The influence of behavioral factors on SMES’ owners intention to adopt private finance

This study examines how behavioral factors of business owners impact on the intention to use private finance in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The study adopts the theory of planned behavior to investigate the effect of attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control on the choice and use of retained earnings and private equity by SMEs. The research samples are firms across 29 countries from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The study uses partial least square structural equation modeling for the analysis. It was found that attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control of owners of SMEs’ impact on their intention to use private finance at a statistically significant level of 1 percent. These findings are discussed and the implications and suggestions for future study are proposed in this paper.