Search results

This article argues that existing research poorly specifies the link between planning and performance because of omitted variable bias. Researchers agree planning is a critical part of creating any new venture. Many researchers assess planning by whether a small firm has a written business plan. Unfortunately, efforts empirically to validate this relationship have been inconclusive. This article proposes that researchers should assess business plans both on the quality of the plan (and the planning process that produced it), and on the quality of the underlying business opportunity. Failure to account for both aspects of a business plan amounts to omitted variable bias, frustrating attempts to accurately estimate the true relationship.

Using the family business succession, resourcebased view of firms, familiness, and organizational clan literatures, this article develops a model based on the ability of the family business to use familiness, a specific bundle of attributes deriving from a family’s culture, as a competitive advantage for the family firm. In particular, this resource-based framework of family business shows how familiness can distinguish between family firms that succeed beyond the second generation and those that do not. Implications for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether public corruption influences entrepreneurial activity in the USA. Because the true underlying level of corruption is inherently unobservable, it cannot be factored into business venturing decisions. The authors hypothesize, therefore, that new business venturing should be related to the expected corruption level.

The authors follow Cordis (2009) to calculate the expected rate of public corruption given observed levels of public corruption. The authors embed the expected level of corruption in a relatively standard model of business venturing, which the authors estimate using a cross section of the US states covering the period of 1986-2009.

Using a relatively standard model of business venturing that accounts for variation in predicted corruption levels, the authors find that entrepreneurs launch more businesses in states with higher predicted corruption.

To the knowledge, no one has previously tested the impact of expected corruption on entrepreneurial activity.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a robustness check of the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and economic freedom. As a deliberate “robustness check,” the authors estimated various spatial measures of entrepreneurship found in the research literature, using the same estimator within a consistent model that included political institutions, proxied by the Economic Freedom of North America index. Like many exemplars in the literature, the authors’ focus was on the US states.

The authors estimated models of five different measures of entrepreneurial activity in a model based on Reynolds, Storey, and Westhead (1994).

The authors failed to replicate many of the results found in the literature. The various measures of entrepreneurship were related to different independent variables. Economic freedom was not a consistently significant predictor of entrepreneurial activity.

The empirical work focuses on the US states, and may not be generalizable. By deliberate choice, the authors did not include many of the independent variables, data corrections, or estimation techniques found in the literature. The results imply the need for additional development in the theory that relates institutions to entrepreneurial activity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no one else has “raced,” side‐by‐side, various entrepreneurship measures in a model that includes institutions.

Entrepreneurship has been widely recognized as having greatly influenced the United States. Its influence has especially been documented over the past 20 years. Paralleling our societal interest in entrepreneurship has been increasing interest in entrepreneurship education. While our interest in entrepreneurship education has grown considerably over the past two decades, this field of study continues to have critics both within and outside of schools and colleges of business (Kuratko 2004). In spite of these criticisms, some researchers suggest that the United States is still far ahead of other regions of the world in terms of entrepreneurial education (Solomon et al. 1998).

Using entrepreneurship education in the United States as a point of departure, this article uses a case study to analyze the efforts of a private university in Bogota, Colombia, to create a new program in entrepreneurship. The Colombian Legislature passed Law 590 in July 2000 as a means to promote and develop entrepreneurship in the nation. Shortly thereafter a private university in Bogota started a new program in entrepreneurship. At the university's invitation, a small number of faculty from U.S. universities participated in the school's “kick-off” efforts. The paper offers analysis and recommendations based on five criteria: 1) What is taught, 2) Why it is taught, 3) How it is taught, 4) How well it works, and 5) Leadership support. In addition, rather than simply adopting a U.S. or European model of entrepreneurship education, the authors propose that they should develop a center that integrates lessons from other models with elements that are relevant to the local situation.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that an implication of Holcombe’s (2002) model is a “revolution trap.” This paper extends Holcombe’s model adding Klein’s concept of entrepreneurship as judgment concerning the use of heterogeneous political capital. The authors use the case of the USA presidential election of 1800 to demonstrate the utility of the extension, and to discuss how political entrepreneurship served to prevent a revolution trap. The political entrepreneurship of 1800 established the precedent of peaceful transition of power in the USA, which opened the door to the rapid economic development of the early nineteenth century.

This is a historical case study using letters, newspapers, pamphlets, and other pieces of empirical evidence to highlight an important moment of political entrepreneurship.

Many contemporary observers predicted that the USA would devolve into continuous revolution, which the authors argue Holcombe’s (2002) model predicts. However, political entrepreneurship ended the revolutionary period in the former British North America. Moreover, the political entrepreneurship ending the election crisis established the precedent of peaceful political succession. This precedent comparatively elevated the returns of productive, market entrepreneurship (Baumol, 1990). As a result, the USA experiences a prolonged period of entrepreneurially driven economic growth.

To the authors knowledge, no one has developed the implication of a “revolution trap” from Holcombe’s (2002) model, nor has anyone applied Klein’s (2008) model to extend Holcombe’s model of political entrepreneurship. Although the disputed presidential election of 1800 has been extensively researched, no one has analyzed the election and its resolution from the perspective of political entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate researchers’ interest by acquainting them with some aspects of the entrepreneurship literature they may not have known.

The paper is a non‐meta‐analytic literature review of several literatures in entrepreneurship.

The entrepreneurship literature is vast and can be found in every discipline where humans and their behaviour are the object of analysis.

Because the entrepreneurship literature is so large and widespread, the paper reviews only a small, deliberately chosen sample of the literature.

To the authors’ knowledge, no one has previously written a unified review of the market entrepreneurship, political entrepreneurship, and public choice.

The purpose of this editorial is to introduce the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy (JEPP).

The paper outlines the primary objectives of JEPP.

JEPP was created to encourage and disseminate quality research about the vital relationships among institutions, entrepreneurship and economic outcomes. JEPP 's aim is to improve the quality of scholarly and public discourse about entrepreneurship and development policies. In general, JEPP seeks high‐quality articles that say something interesting about public policy, entrepreneurship and economic development.

The editorial describes the thinking behind JEPP, and the journal's objectives. JEPP welcomes all scholars and individuals with professional or personal interests in acquiring and sharing knowledge about institutions, entrepreneurship, and economic outcomes.

Researchers have identified the “vibrancy” of living in a spatially defined area as having a positive impact on entrepreneurial activity, measured as new business start-ups. Vibrant areas attract and facilitate would-be entrepreneurs, and attract other entrepreneurs and the skilled people and other resources who can take advantage of the opportunities other entrepreneurs create. A vibrant locale, then, can trigger a virtuous cycle of entrepreneurially led economic and social development. The purpose of this paper is to test this hypothesis.

The unit of observation is the county of the US Census-designated central city of metropolitan statistical areas. The authors use principal components analysis to recover scores from a variety of measures of urban vibrancy. The authors embed these scores in an OLS model of new business venturing.

Within a standard model of new business launches that is designed to be comparable across time and space, the inclusion of principal components scores based on urban vibrancy measures adds little explanatory power.

Policies designed to make an urban area “more vibrant” as a means to the end of attracting new establishment launches may be less successful than policymakers hope.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to apply principal components analysis to measures of urban vibrancy within a general model of new business venturing.