Narrow Results

Prior research on pull entrepreneurship sees opportunity perception as dependent on the individual’s cognitive processes and pays relatively less attention to the role of exogenous factors, which influence and shape our belief structures in the first place. To fill this gap, the main aim of the study is to investigate the relationship between exogenous factors, both positive and negative, and individuals’ opportunity perception. A theoretical framework, based on Institutional Theory, is proposed and empirically tested through panel analysis. The data cover 36 OECD countries observed between 2000 and 2014. The results show that opportunity perception is encouraged by positive exogenous factors, e.g., cultural motivation, social recognition; conversely, it is discouraged by negative exogenous factors, e.g. R&D expenditure and female unemployment. The findings also provide new insights into how exogenous factors impact individuals’ perceptions of opportunities for new business creation, highlighting that positive exogenous factors play a more important role than negative exogenous factors in this process. The empirical results confirm the proposed theoretical framework and allow the formulation of interesting theoretical and managerial implications.

In a previous work by the authors, maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) were obtained for the drift and diffusion coefficients characterizing 2D lognormal diffusion models involving exogenous factors affecting the drift term. Such models are well-known to describe properly the behaviour of real phenomena of interest, for instance, in geophysical and environmental studies. The present paper provides the distribution of these MLEs, the Fisher information matrix, and the solution to some likelihood ratio tests of interest for hypotheses on the parameters weighting the relative effect of the exogenous factors.