This paper uses entrepreneurs´ survival expectations around the time of market entry and subsequent venture exits to study entrepreneurial optimism. Using data on a large number of nascent entrepreneurs in the US and start-ups in Finland, we find that new entrepreneurs´ survival beliefs are on...

Finpro is an expert service organization, partly financed from public funds, providing services for internationalization - market information, consulting and advice, business development, and other related services. It is one of the largest organizations in the Finnish innovation and business...

The study investigates, by using econometric evaluation methods, how the usage of Finpro's (a public agency promoting internationalization of business) services impacts on the internationalization and performance of small and medium-sized firms in Finland. We measure internationalization and...

Using recently collected data on Finnish small businesses, we provide evidence that the debt capacity of growth options, defined as the amount of debt that firms optimally raise for an incremental project, is negative, especially in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. We...

Tässä raportissa kuvataan suomalaisten näkemyksiä yrittäjyydestä uravaihtoehtona hyödyntäen useita eri kyselyaineistoja. Kansainvälisesti vertaillen suomalaisten halu ryhtyä yrittäjäksi on laimeaa. Kyselyaineistojen valossa vaikuttaa siltä, että yrittäjäksi ei ryhdytä...

There is considerable consensus in the literature that entrepreneurs are prone to unrealistic optimism. Our new field evidence from a sample of four-month-old start-ups echoes this finding: as many as 87% of new entrepreneurs expect to survive at least three years in business, whereas the actual...

Using new data originating from a recently conducted survey, this paper examines the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in private equity and debt markets in Finland. We find that the three most important sources of funds are the principal owner’s equity, trade credit...

In this paper we present a comparative analysis of Nordic countries’ financial systems and consider in particular the recent growth of Nordic venture capital industries. We document that the Nordic countries’ financial systems display several similarities that have characterized their...

In this paper we study the relation between firm-level disclosure quality and the availability of external finance to firms. Using data on Finnish firms that are mostly private and small, we first estimate ‘excess growth’ made possible by external finance. We then show that the excess growth...

While the negative qualitative relation between the cost of debt capital and firm age is rather well established in the financial economics literature, there are few, if any, quantitative estimates available of the magnitude of the age effect. This study analyses this effect by utilizing a large...