In this paper we investigate whether consumer loans are used to finance business activities. We show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts significantly more often than employee households. The difference remains when controlling for financial and non-financial...

While in less developed and in transition economies microlending has become an efficient instrument for providing small and micro businesses with the necessary financial means, in industrialized countries, with highly developed banking systems, the existence and size of an uncovered demand for...

Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) are publicly funded organisations that provide small loans to people in financially underserved areas of the UK. Policy makers have repeatedly sought to understand and measure the performance of CDFIs to ensure the efficient use of public funds,...

Supporting start-ups by unemployed persons with governmental programs became an important issue as benefits could include termination of unemployment and further job creation. However, it is feared that previously unemployed lack qualifications for entrepreneurship. We analyze potential effects...

We experimentally test the efficacy of indenture as a self-enforced contract device. In an indenture game, the principal signals the intention of payment-on-delivery, by tearing a banknote and giving the agent half of it as “prepayment”; the agent receives the completing half after...

This paper studies the role of information in dictator and impunity games. We experiment with four settings: i) a standard dictator game; ii) a dictator game where the surplus size is stochastic, with a probability of being a big or small pie, and the actual size is unobservable to the responder;...

Risk attitudes have an impact on not only the decision to become an entrepreneur but also on the survival and failure rates of entrepreneurs. Whereas recent research underpins the theoretical proposition of a positive correlation between risk attitudes and the decision to become an entrepreneur,...

This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which focuses on the personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction of entrepreneurial success. A unique data set is used consisting of 414 persons whose personal characteristics were...

In developing and transition economies, microlending has become an effective instrument for providing micro businesses with the necessary financial resources to launch operations. In industrialized countries, with their highly developed banking systems, however, there has been ongoing debate on...