The Problems with and Promise of Entrepreneurial Finance

Research SummaryThis paper provides a review of the entrepreneurial finance literature in the surprisingly not very well integrated entrepreneurship and finance journals. Entrepreneurial finance encompasses venture capital, private equity, private debt, trade credit, IPOs, angel finance, and crowdfunding, among other forms of finance. We analyze trends in citation activity to these topic areas across sixteen journals that publish at least somewhat regularly on these topics, and show there has been a rise in citations to the venture capital, private equity, and IPOs post-2006. We highlight an unfortunate degree of segmentation in the literature, as well as topics that have been the subject of scholarly focus, and identify promising topics for future research. Managerial SummaryWho does research in entrepreneurial finance – entrepreneurship or finance scholars? And why types of journals are more likely to publish research in entrepreneurial finance? In this paper, we provide an overview of the literature on topics that include venture capital, private equity, private debt, trade credit, IPOs, angel finance, and crowdfunding. Our review of the literature shows that some elements of segmentation by the specific topic, which we explain is partly due to the fact that datasets on entrepreneurial finance themselves are often segmented and do not include information on more than one form of entrepreneurial finance at a time. Further, we show citation patterns are segmented by the type of journal, where finance journals are much less likely to refer to entrepreneurship journals