While the importance of venture capital to the growth of small firms has been widely discussed during the past decade, little is know about the uses of equity capital, especially internal equity capital, by majority of small firms in the United States. Information from the Federal Reserve...

Does an entrepreneur-friendly bankruptcy law encourage more entrepreneurship development at a societal level? How does bankruptcy law affect entrepreneurship development around the world? Drawing on a real options perspective, we argue that if bankrupt entrepreneurs are excessively punished for...

Firm birth has recently been an important topic for many state governments. However, ways in which state governments can influence firm births are not obvious, and their efficiency in fostering firm births in comparison with their peers is even less so. Focusing on the birth of small U.S. firms,...

Studies on venture capital (VC) investment decision using espoused criteria and utility aggregation methods have shown mixed results. Using a latent decision structures approach from psychological scaling literature, we reduce random and systematic biases arising from VC decision environment. In...

This paper tests a real options model of stepwise entrepreneurial entry. We distinguish between part time and full time entry among the self employed in Swedish knowledge intensive industries. Two multinomial logit models tests the entry from employment to part- or full time entry in 1998, and...

This paper attempts to reconcile the risk-bearing characterization of entrepreneurs with the stylized fact that entrepreneurs exhibit conventional risk aversion profiles. We propose that the disparity arises from confounding two distinct dimensions of uncertainty: demand uncertainty and ability...

In this report we have summarized our research into the nature of firm growth in the U.S. over the 5 year period 1998-2003 using comprehensive data on U.S. businesses extracted from the Census database. We have analyzed these data with a particular eye to the departures from standard assumptions...

The research uses 377 firms that filed initial public offerings from 1990 to 1993 as the basis for existing firms and follows their financial performance from 1990 to 2004. In the first year of a new firm’s existence, before the entrant has time to contribute to positive local effects, its...

The federal government purchased goods and services valued at approximately $100 billion from small businesses in FY 2003, which was up from previous years. Moreover, in FY 2003, the federal government exceeded its small business contracting goal of 23 percent. Despite such achievements,...

Banking consolidation has continued to accelerate over the past several years, assisted by technological innovations in information management and statistical modeling, and by the large merger and acquisition (M&A) deals of the late 1990s. Total domestic assets held by the largest 50 bank...