Financial Development, Gender and Entrepreneurship

Female entrepreneurs are much less frequent than male entrepreneurs. In this paper we investigate a possible culprit: access to financial services. We use a dataset with entrepreneurship rates by opportunity and by need from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and indicators of financial institutions from Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt and Levine (2000) for 41 developed and developing countries from 2001 to 2004. Our conclusions are that financial development, though generally encouraging entrepreneurial activity, is unlikely, by itself, to contribute to bring male and female entrepreneurship rates closer together. Moreover, our results suggest that it is entrepreneurship by need that is most affected by financial development, suggesting that the possible more complex aspects of evaluating projects associated with market or technological opportunities are not overcome by aggregate financial development and need more specific measures.