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Identifying people interested into starting-up a business is becoming more and more relevant. As widely recognized, two key aspects affecting on start-up are the role of the external context factors and the influence of entrepreneurial competencies.

With this in mind, the paper shows an application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour with the aim to assess factors believed to affect entrepreneurial intent among engineering students. As the use of well thought-out and research-tested intent models is believed to provide a good means of examining the precursors to business start-up, the survey provides a test of the robustness of the intent approach and then examines the influence of some predictors within the contextual factors.

Consistently with other leading articles, the results evidence that attitudes and perceived behavioural control effectively predicts entrepreneurial intent, while social norms have no effects. As regards the role of contextual factors and entrepreneurial competencies, they exhibit indirect effects on intent via entrepreneurial attitudes and perceived behavioural control. Thus, their contribution to favour academic entrepreneurship is confirmed. The result of the study also has valuable implications for the university system.

Entrepreneurship training programmes and self-employment initiatives for unemployed adults has become a new frontier for poverty reduction in South Africa. This article investigates the types of challenges graduates encounter and opportunities in accessing financial services in order to start-up and grow an own micro-enterprise in South Africa. The main findings reveal that micro-finance institutions are keen to grant loans and credits to graduates from entrepreneurial training centres. However, graduates are not eligible for credits because they fail to meet the security requirements of the lending banks due to their socio-economic situations. The author concludes that if centre managers do not involve micro-finance institutions prior to the training delivery and transition stages of the entrepreneurial training programmes, graduates will continue finding it difficult to access financial services and enter self-employment after obtaining the required entrepreneurship skills.

Applying Ajzen’s planned behavior theory, we study the impact of control beliefs (reflected by an internal locus of control) and normative beliefs (investigated via individualistic cultural orientation) on entrepreneurial attitudes and self-employment intentions of final year university students. We particularly explore the interactive effect of internal locus of control and culture when explaining entrepreneurial attitudes, which consequently shapes self-employment intentions. The data were collected at a German university and three universities in East Africa. We received 590 complete responses. We used PROCESS Macro to test our model and hypotheses. Our findings show that both internal locus of control and culture predict entrepreneurial attitudes and self-employment intention. The effects of international locus of control are mediated by entrepreneurial attitudes. Moreover, the indirect effect is further conditioned by culture. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

This study proposes that cooperative efforts in microlending aid economic development and poverty alleviation in transitioning and developing countries by creating networking systems in which people can expand their businesses through working capital and community cooperation. Two field studies are used to validate the authors' claims. The first examines a microfinance cooperative structure in Bulgaria as a means to secure credit, savings, technical support and networking opportunities for cooperative members. The second looks at a cooperative microfinance institution in the Philippines that appears to create greater socio-economic growth for poor entrepreneurs as well as NGO financial viability. Both studies suggest that cooperative microlending leads to high survival rates and success of self-employed entrepreneurs by facilitating social capital through their organizational processes.

This study examines the impact of entrepreneurship on economic growth by using a new variable based on patent data to proxy for productive entrepreneurship. Data on self-employment is used as an alternative proxy. The study considers 22 OECD countries and finds a positive relationship between the proposed measure of productive entrepreneurship — degree of innovativeness of different nations — and economic growth, while the alternative measure, based on self-employment, appears to be negatively correlated with economic growth. A battery of econometric specifications and techniques backs the findings.

Residential segregation has played a central role in theories of minority entrepreneurship. This study integrates two theories in the extant literature on minorities and urban areas (spatial assimilation theory and labor market disadvantage theory); and tests a hypothesis on the self-employment likelihood of black Americans. Descriptive statistics indicate a negative relationship between black-white segregation and increasing socioeconomic status (SES), although blacks remain considerably residentially segregated from whites of similar SES. The model results indicate that, after controlling for a number of factors, segregation of high SES blacks and whites in a metropolitan area is associated with higher likelihood of black self-employment.

In this paper, we compare the intentionality of students in graduate business programs in the United States and China toward becoming entrepreneurs. We utilize Amabile's Work Preference Inventory (WPI) to examine the motivational dimension of entrepreneurial intentionality and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to compare the impact of gender and family history of self-employment on employment intentionality. Our results suggest there is a positive relationship with entrepreneurial intent in both the intrinsic challenge characteristic and extrinsic compensation characteristic. Results also suggest the intrinsic enjoyment characteristic and extrinsic outward characteristic are negatively correlated to self-employment. In addition, the study found that males in China exhibited a significantly greater intentionality toward self-employment than females did. We also found that entrepreneurial intentionality is stronger in the U.S. study group than in the China group for those with prior self-employment experience, as well as when they have a background that includes a family history of self-employment. However, when there is no family background of self-employment, the Chinese show greater intentionality to become self-employed than the group located in the United States.

The level of self-employment among immigrants is often higher than among natives. The purpose of this paper was to test empirically whether selective migration with respect to entrepreneurial characteristics may explain this difference. The relevant hypotheses were tested comparing representative samples of Russian immigrants in Norway and their stay-at-home counterparts. Data from the Russian population came from the 2008 GEM study, while data on Russian immigrants in Norway were collected through a specially designed postal survey. The analysis revealed some demographic dissimilarity between the two groups, as well as a presence of selective migration with respect to entrepreneurial characteristics. This study demonstrates that immigrants (as compared to non-migrants) are more likely to report intentions to start a business. Moreover, they possess relatively large amount of specific human capital, social capital and self-confidence relevant for entrepreneurship. The paper concludes with proposed practical implications and suggestions for further research.

Compared to other ethnic groups, the black population of South Africa has a low participation rate in entrepreneurship activities. The research question of this article is to explain this empirical fact. Based on twenty-four expert interviews, five patterns of explanation are presented and elaborated: a historical apartheid explanation, a financial resources explanation, a human capital explanation, a traits and mindset explanation and a social capital and network explanation. The historical apartheid explanation cannot be qualified independently of the other explanations as a distinctive explanation of its own. Although missing financial resources and shortages of human capital are the factors most often mentioned by the experts, and probably the most important ones, the remaining two explanations (mindset and social network) also deserve attention. A point argued in the conclusion of this article is that socio-cultural values, and the concept of "social capital" in particular, merit further investigation with respect to the question of why there is a lack of black entrepreneurship in South Africa.

Creative and qualified self-employed individuals contribute to economic growth by inventing new products, production processes, distribution methods and employing other people. Researchers are interested in self-employment if it can provide jobs to the unemployed population and also for those who face job discrimination. However, increase in self-employment is uncertain because entrepreneurial skills are assumed to be risky and self-employed workers can learn their skills gradually after starting their businesses. Economists pay special attention to finding the conceptual relationship between entrepreneurship as self-employment and economic development. Furthermore, studies show that the process of entrepreneurship has significant spatial autocorrelation and affects neighboring counties. Thus, the objective of this study is to identify and estimate the spatial impacts of self-employment in the economic development of the northeastern United States. The study expects to provide policy makers with vital information for policy measures designed for economic development. The study uses the Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) to estimate the relationship of employment, population and per capita income against self-employment. The results indicate that employment and population are positively linked to self-employment. Also, results highlight the positive contribution of self-employment on rural economic development.

A growing body of research in entrepreneurship has explored the personality and social determinants of entrepreneurial intentions (EI). Most empirical work in this area has emphasized the “pull” approach to EI, which focuses on the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. In contrast, the “push” approach to EI, which explains EI as a function of displacing events in one’s life, has received little scholarly attention. This study contributes to the “push” approach to EI by examining involuntary job loss as a specific situational factor that influences EI. This study investigates whether problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies predict EI among individuals who have experienced involuntary job loss. Furthermore, we test whether entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) mediates the relationship between coping and EI. Using a sample of 266 individuals who had experienced recent involuntary job loss, we found that the use of problem-focused coping strategies was positively associated with EI and that this relationship was mediated by ESE. On the other hand, the use of emotion-focused coping strategies to manage job loss was unrelated to EI. Overall, our findings highlight the role of problem-focused coping in effectively managing the impacts of involuntary job loss.

This paper presents an empirical study investigating the effect of entrepreneurship on the incidence of informal employment. It builds upon economic models exploring the determinants of informal economy by analyzing the role played by institutions and policies and their effect on the informal sector. Among policies examined are payroll and severance taxes, labor and product market regulations, unemployment benefits, firing and hiring costs, enforcement of financial contracts and financial costs. The empirical analysis is based on a panel data approach. The main result of the paper supports the view that the informal sector is an “unregulated micro-entrepreneurial sector.” The findings suggest that differences in the level of entrepreneurial activities across developing countries are associated with variance in the incidence of informal employment, and that entrepreneurship has a positive effect on the informal sector. The incidence of informal employment is strongly affected by the public perception of government performance, role, accountability and effectiveness, as well as labor market and business regulations.

Entrepreneurs are critical for countries’ industrial dynamics and economic growth. Although there are several studies focusing on the attitudes, cognitions and traits of entrepreneurs, only a few have explored the link between entrepreneurship and the job features entrepreneurs most value in the work setting. Taking a longitudinal perspective, over two periods of time, 1990–1993 and 2008–2010, the present study resorted to the European Value Study dataset, encompassing 27 European countries and more than 100 thousand individuals. Based on logistic estimates, we found that, compared with non-entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs consider work more important than other life dimensions (except family). Moreover, some work values associated with entrepreneurship (e.g., use initiative, achieving something, responsible job, meeting abilities, have a say, and learning new skills) are indeed mentioned the most by entrepreneurs and emerged significantly related with entrepreneurial propensity. Finally, some work values (e.g., have a say) are associated with entrepreneurship propensity regardless of country’s culture, whereas others (e.g., interesting job) are strongly influenced by culture.

In recent years, recognition that bogus self-employment is rapidly growing, not least because of the advent of what has been called the ‘gig,’ ‘sharing’ or ‘collaborative’ economy, has led governments to search for ways to tackle this form of dependent self-employment that is widely viewed as diminishing the quality of working conditions. Until now, however, there have been few ex-post evaluations of policy initiatives that seek to tackle this phenomenon. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide one of the first ex-post evaluations by examining the outcomes of a 2016 legislative initiative in Romania to tackle bogus self-employment. Reporting both descriptive statistics and OLS regression analysis on monthly official data from August 2014 to August 2016, the finding is that while other business types and waged employment rates followed a similar trend to the years before the introduction of the new legislation, the number of self-employed started a negative trend after the new legislation was announced. After controlling for other indicators related to the economy (i.e. GDP) and labor market (i.e. employees, other companies, vacancy rates), the impact of the new legislation on the self-employed remains negative, offering reasonable grounds for assuming bogus self-employed was lowered by the new legislation. The paper concludes by discussing the wider implications of these findings.

Considerable research has been conducted in the field of entrepreneurship. However, very few studies have explored the impact of entrepreneurship on the life satisfaction/happiness of individuals. Furthermore, they have yet to analyze the extent to which the impact of entrepreneurship is mediated by national cultures. The present study explores the effect of entrepreneurship on the life satisfaction/happiness of individuals and analyzes the extent to which such impact is mediated by ‘national cultures.’ Resorting to fixed effect panel data techniques, this study was conducted using the 2016 World Values Survey dataset, encompassing 90350 individuals from 60 countries over the 2010–2013 period, combined with information provided by the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) Framework on cultural measures. We found that being an entrepreneur increases the chances of happiness across the entire set of countries analyzed. Culture does matter in such relation as the impact of entrepreneurship on happiness varies across the sample, being positive for sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe and negative for the Middle East culture cluster. Governments should implement active policies to foster the emergence of new businesses because new ventures enable countries not only to increase their output per capita, but also to achieve economic development by stimulating well-being and happiness. Nevertheless, this study highlights the danger of ‘blind’ recipes/formulas to promote entrepreneurship without considering the ‘entrepreneurship ecosystem’ and, at a more general level, the countries’ culture.

Self-employment in the informal sector keeps poor people alive, but it rarely enables them to exit poverty. To exit poverty through self-employment, poor people require monetary and non-monetary resources which they overwhelmingly lack. To escape this dilemma, the owners of survivalist business firms need to band together in order to assemble a minimal resource base on the strength of which they can together upgrade their partnership. Because resources are scarce in poverty populations, this task is exceptionally hard to accomplish. Rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCAs) can enable individuals to exit poverty through self-employment, but ROSCAs only work in the most-resourced, upper tier of a poverty population. In the lower tier, Grameen model banks inject organizational, educational, and financial resources that enable impoverished individuals to exit poverty by upgrading a survivalist business.

Although Blacks in the United States suffered disproportionately high unemployment, housing and wealth losses during the Great Recession, little is known about the recession’s impact on Black entrepreneurship. This study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to estimate the difference in probability of starting a business before and after the recession for Black and White households. While the likelihood of starting a business declined for Whites after the Great Recession there were no statistically significant changes in the rate of firm startups among Blacks. Evidence supports the prosperity pull hypothesis for White but not Black entrepreneurs.

This study provides updated modalities for ensuring equitable income distributions in developing countries. This was achieved through the lens of self-employment, information and communication technologies (ICT), and remittances. To circumvent the dark spots in prior studies, this study harnesses annual panel series for 52 African countries. The study engaged both the system generalized method of moments (sGMM) and the panel quantile regression with nonadditive fixed effects (QRPD) techniques to elicit updated insights. Meanwhile, three metrics of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, the Atkinson index, and the Palma ratio, were explored for robust insights. A key discovery from both panel computations is the self-exacerbating inclinations of income disparities in the continent. Furthermore, it was discovered that both self-employment and ICT are significant income equalization factors. However, their influence is most effective at the upper quantiles of inequality. The influence of remittance inflows is predominantly unfavorable for equitable income distribution. Both financial inclusion and government effectiveness provided varying inequality-reducing effects. Notably, their influence is more formidable at the upper quantiles. Human capital development provides some noticeable income equalization effects, particularly at the lower quantiles. Policy insights for minifying income inequality in the continent are highlighted herein.