This study shows that entrepreneurs' use of debt-financing sources is conditioned by the resources embedded in their social networks. More business or political contacts increase entrepreneurs' probability of using formal financial sources, and more urban ties increases their probability of...

Unemployment and proprietorship can be related in several ways. As unemployment increases, individuals with fewer job alternatives may choose to start their own business resulting in an increase in proprietorship. Alternatively, if an increase in unemployment is the result of a depressed...

Recent research highlights that founders' early decisions and the environmental conditions at founding each imprint upon a new venture in ways that affect growth and survival. However, we know much less about how the entrepreneur is imprinted and how the outcome of this imprinting process...

Emerging ventures rarely have the resources they need, which often force them to reach beyond their boundaries to access these resources. While the field has acknowledged how critical external relationships are in the emergence process, we lack an understanding of how these relationships evolve....

In this paper we analyze business planning from the perspective of the nascent entrepreneur. We measure its value for the entrepreneur at the point where he must decide whether or not to plan, and we contrast our results with empirical studies that compare firms' performance after market entry....

We examine how organizational stakeholders use narratives in their psychological processing of venture failure. We identify a range of “narrative attributions”, alternative accounts of failure that actors draw on to process the failure and their role in it. Our analysis provides a view of...