Access-to-Credit and the Rate of Victimization in an Entrepreneurial Community

The scope of the paper is to empirically assess whether entrepreneurs experiencing difficulties in access-to-credit are vulnerable to some forms of victimization, especially when this refers to crimes more related to entrepreneurs’ activity. The basic idea is that those entrepreneurs might be induced to fund themselves into the informal and criminal credit markets or, if informationally captured by a bank, can be exposed to requests from the financial intermediary that might also have a criminal profile. This has been investigated using an original data set with information collected through a victimization survey administered to entrepreneurs in Campania, the largest region in the South of Italy. The estimation results from a logistic equation are consistent with the hypothesis that, in presence of difficulties in accessing credit, the entrepreneur might incur in a higher risk of victimization.