The literature on corporate governance and entrepreneurial finance suggests that when lender–borrower relationships are of longer duration, they tend to be more successful in solving the informational asymmetry problems related to small business debt financing. Using the data from Canadian...

This paper proposes that risk aversion encourages individuals to invest in balancedskill profiles, making them more likely to become entrepreneurs. By not havingtaken this possible linkage into account, previous research has underestimated the impactsboth of risk aversion and balanced skills on...

This paper deals with the influence of cultural attitudes towards uncertainty on the level of businessownership across countries. First, the concepts of uncertainty and risk are elaborated, as well as theirrelevance for entrepreneurship. Second, cross-sectional regression analysis using data for...

Existing studies show a positive relationship between entrepreneurs' business performance and their conventional human capital as measured by previous business experience and formal education. In this paper, we explore whether illegal entrepreneurship experience (IEE), an unconventional form of...

This paper studies the impact of diversity in cognitive ability among members of a team on their performance. We conduct a large field experiment in which teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. Exogenous variation in - otherwise random - team composition is...

The influence of industrial structure, more specifically of business ownership, is investigated on the level of unemployment in Japan. The question is to what extent business ownership, i.e., entrepreneurship, can reduce the level of unemployment. It will be concluded that Japan is hardly an...

What is the effect of dispersed levels of cognitive ability of members of a (business) team on their team’s performance? This paper reports the results of a field experiment in which 573 students in 49 teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. We ensured exogenous...

Little empirical evidence provides insight in person-oriented drivers of business survival and success of small business owners. In this paper I perform a duration analysis of business survival amongst young white (selfemployed) small business owners in the U.S. Compulsory exits are...

One of the most salient and relevant dimensions of team heterogeneity is ethnicity. We measure the impact of ethnic diversity on the performance of business teams using a field experiment. We follow 550 students who set up 45 real companies as part of their curriculum in an international...

This discussion paper led to the publication in the <I>Journal of Economic Psychology</I> 2012, 33(2), 410-424.<P> In the media role models are increasingly being acknowledged as an influential factor in explaining the reasons for the choice of occupation and career. Various conceptual studies have...</p></i>