Small Business Economics最新文献

This exploratory study develops an understanding of how the hitherto under-investigated psychological dimension of place affects entrepreneurs’ well-being. The analysis focuses on eudaimonic well-being, which describes individuals’ psychological functioning and fulfillment of their best potentials and is relatively underexplored compared to hedonic well-being (happiness). Based on prior work in environmental psychology, the study proposes that entrepreneurs’ sense of place—their psychological bond with the local setting of their entrepreneurial activities—is an important component influencing their well-being. The empirical analysis of two waves of original survey data from entrepreneurs located in an urban and a rural region of Finland shows that the sense of place is positively associated with several dimensions of eudaimonic well-being. This study extends the literature by shifting the focus from place as a passive container for entrepreneurs’ activities to its role as an active source of entrepreneurial well-being.

The perception of regional opportunities is the crucial starting point of the entrepreneurial process. To explain regional opportunity perception in general and innovative regional opportunity perception specifically is of key interest for steering regional entrepreneurial activities. It is known that entrepreneurship is a regional phenomenon; thus, the interrelation between individual inhabitants of a region and their regional context is of crucial relevance. A primary data collection in Germany assessed the regional embeddedness of inhabitants on four levels—actor, network, environment, and culture. The relation between these levels and the likelihood of opportunity perception is analysed by applying binary logistic regression analyses. The results suggest that regional embeddedness matters, although innovative regional opportunity perception is less dependent on regional embeddedness than regional opportunity perception in general. Derived from the results, entrepreneurship policies aiming at regional economic development, potentially profit most when policies focus on innovative entrepreneurial endeavours.

This paper investigates how signaling and herding behavior interact in crowdfunding markets to give raise to an information cascade, even when there are no identifiable experts, which is the typical case in reward-based crowdfunding. Using daily funding data for on all the projects launched on Kickstarter during one month, we find that during the initial phase of the campaign, the funding decisions of a reduced number of early backers are based on information and quality signals offered by the creator. However, during the second phase, signaling is substituted by the herding behavior of a large number of late backers, imitating early backers. The results suggest that, even in the absence of identifiable experts, backers self-select into early or late backers depending on their ability to process the information, so that herding after signaling generates an information cascade that ameliorates asymmetric information problems. The findings are relevant for (i) creators, that will obtain better results by targeting their crowdfunding campaigns at better informed potential contributors, and (ii) regulators, that can expect backers’ self-selection and herding to work together to protect uninformed backers from fraud and deception even when participation is not restricted.

Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems has consolidated over the past decades. This study ventures beyond traditional analyses that primarily focus on quantitative outcomes to investigate the foundational processes that can facilitate a range of socio-economic advantages. Recognizing a gap in the existing literature, which often correlates input factors with anticipated benefits yet struggles to unearth underlying mechanisms, our research offers a novel perspective through applying a network-centric service ecosystem lens grounded in a service-dominant logic. Utilizing a qualitative approach based on pragmatic abduction, 16 narrative interviews explored the experiences and perspectives of multiple entrepreneurial actors within a privately governed Spanish ecosystem. Findings present a conceptual model that bridges emphasis between structure and outcomes with those of agency and strategy.

This study examines whether Italian firms exposed to physical climate risks incur additional borrowing costs due to spatial spillovers. Using a sample of 419,040 firm-year observations from 2016 to 2019, we find a positive relationship between a firm’s cost of debt and its neighborhood’s average exposure to climate risk. According to our findings, the costs associated with neighborhood climate risk are as relevant as those associated with a firm’s direct risk, with small businesses being the only ones affected by spillover effects. These results may be explained by small enterprises’ lack of financial diversification, poor bargaining power, and strong reliance on credit from financial intermediaries.

I study the effect that miniaturized franchising opportunities (microfranchise) can have on necessity entrepreneurs in less developed countries. The capacity of necessity entrepreneurs to self-supply entrepreneurial inputs may be smaller than for opportunity entrepreneurs, leading to poor outcomes in independent businesses. A microfranchise provides entrepreneurial inputs such as branding, marketing, supply chain logistics, product design, best practices, and reduced demand uncertainty. Franchisor-supplied inputs may substitute for individual disadvantages, leading to greater business profit. Using a unique data set from Bangladesh, Ghana, and Guatemala, I test this hypothesis. Through control function models, I find evidence that necessity entrepreneurs under perform their peers in independent business and that the average returns to microfranchising are larger for necessity entrepreneurs. Results suggest that franchisor’s temporary provision of specific capital acts similar to a start-up capital loan, drawing important comparisons with microcredit.

Abstract

Biases and paradoxes are inherently context-dependent phenomena, as they are influenced by various contextual factors that can either magnify or diminish their prominence. In the realm of family entrepreneurship, these contextual intricacies are particularly pronounced due to the confluence of family life, family values, and family and business objectives. Nonetheless, the literature on family entrepreneurship has largely neglected exploration of whether the biases exhibited by family entrepreneurs are intricately linked to, stem from, and predict paradoxes. In this research, we gather, assess, and synthesize current literature to uncover whether and how biases of family entrepreneurs are linked with paradoxes—unique in the family entrepreneurship context—and how they affect behavior in family businesses. Our main contribution lies in the construction of an encompassing framework informed by the lens of value heterogeneity. This integrative framework aims to guide future research and hence to push research on the link between biases and paradoxes of family entrepreneurs further.

Unavailable or expensive health insurance may hinder the transition of individuals from paid employment to entrepreneurship, a phenomenon called entrepreneurship lock. The literature argues that the guaranteed availability of health insurance introduced by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the USA in 2010 could reduce this barrier to entrepreneurship and thereby increase entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, we investigate to what extent entrepreneurship lock exists due to health insurance costs even when the availability of health insurance is given. We use individual-level data from the Current Population Survey (CPS-ASEC) combined with county-level panel data on health insurance costs in local health insurance exchanges (HIX) introduced by the ACA to estimate county-treatment fixed effects regressions. The results indicate that a hike in the premium of the benchmark HIX plan by 1% decreases the entry rate into self-employment by 0.76%. Men react more strongly to local HIX premiums than women. There is a stronger effect on starting incorporated businesses than on starting unincorporated businesses, which suggests that the additional businesses triggered by lower HIX premiums are of relatively high quality.

This paper develops theory to explore when it is most efficient for entrepreneurs operating under Knightian uncertainty to contract with human capital resource providers through market governance as independent contractors or through firm governance as employees or holders of residual rights of control (i.e., co-ownership stakes in the entrepreneurial firm). We identify and develop the notion of unintentional adverse skill selection which can occur if skill requirements change as entrepreneurs experiment with the production of new resource combinations of uncertain future value. We explore the comparative efficiency of the cooperative flexibility of firm governance and the autonomous flexibility of market governance when unintentional adverse skill selection is salient. We develop a typology of human capital resources based on the breadth and depth of the skills they possess. We propose that skill breadth is positively associated with the expected efficiency of firm governance and that skill depth is positively associated with the expected efficiency of market governance. We then utilize this typology to theorize about which governance mechanisms are most efficient for transacting with four types of human capital resources: polymaths (high skill breadth, high skill depth), novices (low skill breadth, low skill depth), specialists (low skill breadth, high skill depth), and Jacks/Jills-of-all-trades (high skill breadth, low skill depth).

Comparative international entrepreneurship research has often used measures of high-growth expectations entrepreneurship to proxy for the construct of high-impact entrepreneurship. We revisit this practice by assessing the cross-country association between high-growth expectations and realized high-impact entrepreneurship to speak to construct measurement fit. We find that expectations are not a good proxy for realizations; they are associated with different determinants and outcomes, respectively. We go on to introduce the notion of entrepreneurial projection bias to gauge the misfit between expectations and realizations. Conditioning on entrepreneurial projection bias partially restores the association between realized high-impact entrepreneurship and its determinants (or outcomes) when realizations are proxied using expectations. Furthermore, we show that opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship also does not proxy well for high-impact entrepreneurship. Our analysis brings into question current survey-based approaches to measuring high-impact entrepreneurship and existing rankings of countries’ entrepreneurial performance, with important implications for entrepreneurship theory and policy.