Using data from representative population surveys in 17 countries, we find that the lower rate of female business ownership is primarily due to women’s lower propensity to start businesses rather than to differences in survival rates across genders. We show that women are less confident in their entrepreneurial skills, have different social networks and exhibit higher fear of failure than men. ...

Non-technical summary Founders often have big problems with firm financing issues. Financing problems may arise for many reasons. Information asymmetry and uncertainty are important, but so are such things as ignorance. Experienced entrepreneurs should have more knowledge about financing issues and should be more likely to know who to turn to for help and advice. Thus, they have advantages over...

Green start-ups play a vital role in the needed transition towards more environmentally sustainable economies. Yet our understanding of why some founders start green ventures and others do not remains incomplete. We build on cognitive decision-making perspectives pro-environmental engagement to shed light founders' personality traits - focusing ‘Big 5’ risk tolerance explaining whether new with...

This study examined the dispositional optimism and entrepreneurial intent of undergraduate American and Canadian entrepreneurship students. It was found that American entrepreneurship students had lower levels of dispositional optimism (one’s positive expectation for the future), a defining characteristic of successful entrepreneurs, when compared to Canadian entrepreneurship students. Moreover...

We investigate the effect of broad personality traits—the Big Five—on an individual’s decision to become self-employed. In particular, we test an overall indicator of the entrepreneurial personality. Since we find that the level of selfemployment varies considerably across professions, we also perform the analysis for different types of professions, namely, those classified as being in the “cre...