We analyze a standard environment of adverse selection in credit markets. In our environment, entrepreneurs who are privately informed about the quality of their projects need to borrow in order to invest. Conventional wisdom says that, in this class of economies, the competitive equilibrium is typically inefficient. We show that this conventional wisdom rests on one implicit assumption: entrep...

Returns for Entrepreneurs vs. Employees: The Effect of Education and Personal Control on the Relative Performance of Entrepreneurs vs. Wage Employees How valuable is education for entrepreneurs’ performance as compared to employees’? What might explain any differences? And does education affect peoples’ occupational choices accordingly? We answer these questions based on a large panel of US lab...

This paper provides a review of the profiles of the subsistence entrepreneurs and their constraints, and the landscape of current entrepreneurship programs and the evidence on impacts, and discusses the potential role of public policies for the livelihoods of subsistence entrepreneurs. Worldwide over a half of workers are self-employed, but a significant fraction of these self-employed jobs are...

Entrepreneurship policy mainly aims to promote innovative Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. However, the rate of entrepreneurship is commonly proxied using quantity-based metrics, such as small business activity, the self-employment rate, or the number of startups. We argue that those metrics give rise to misleading inferences regarding high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. To unambiguously...

Social media has been an incredible platform for startups to develop meaningful connections with stakeholders and customers. We investigate ways in which entrepreneurs use social media to drive both the level of engagement for their startup and the subsequent level of venture financing. Our empirical analysis demonstrates how differences in entrepreneurs’ tweets—i.e., differences in the level i...

Innovation spurs economic growth and development. Pro-poor innovation in rural areas is more likely to occur through small-scale ventures and entrepreneurs than industrial research and development. Whilst previous rural development policies have focussed on small-holder agriculture, the fact is that most rural poor are landless poor and therefore unlikely to benefit greatly from agriculture-bas...

This study analyzes the innovative orientation of the Croatian entrepreneurs. Innovative orientation is represented by the perceived extent to which an entrepreneur’s product or service or technology is new, and no other businesses offer the same product. The sample is extracted from the GEM Croatia Adult Population Survey dataset for the years 2003-2013. We apply descriptive statistics, t-test...

Entrepreneurs are often faced with problems regarding start-up financing. But compared to novice entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs should have both more knowledge and better contacts, which should potentially reduce the occurrence of problems and affect finance composition. However, experience of business failure might result in additional effects. This analysis therefore investigates th...

This paper attempts to reconcile the risk-bearing characterization of entrepreneurs with the stylized fact that entrepreneurs exhibit conventional risk aversion profiles. We propose that the disparity arises from confounding two distinct dimensions of uncertainty: demand uncertainty and ability uncertainty. We further propose that entrepreneurs will be risk averse with respect to demand uncerta...