The credit frictions encountered by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been widely examined in the entrepreneurship literature. Although theory suggests that asset tangibility helps increase firms’ borrowing capacity because it allows creditors to take possession of a firm’s assets more easily, this paper provides new evidence about the role of intangible assets in reducing credit frictions for SMEs. Using an extensive dataset of more than 155,852 SMEs in Vietnam and a multivariate probit model, we find that identifiable intangible assets improve firm access to debt and equity finance. Interestingly, it is found that the friction-reducing effect of intangibles is stronger on debt finance than on equity finance, suggesting non-equivalent distributional effects of intangible assets on firm capital structure. Moreover, firm age and size can moderate the association between intangibles and access to the two sources of external finance.

中小企业 (SME) 遇到的信贷摩擦已在创业文献中得到广泛研究。虽然理论表明资产有形性有助于提高企业的借贷能力，因为它允许债权人更容易地占有企业的资产，但本文提供了关于无形资产在减少中小企业信贷摩擦方面的作用的新证据。使用越南超过 155,852 家中小企业的广泛数据集和多元概率模型，我们发现可识别的无形资产改善了企业获得债务和股权融资的机会。有趣的是，研究发现无形资产对债务融资的摩擦减少作用强于股权融资，这表明无形资产对公司资本结构的分配效应是非等价的。而且，