This paper uses National Child Development Study data for a large cohort of British individuals, to explore the influence of education, inheritance and other background characteristics on the propensity to become self-employed; and also on subsequent success, as measured by job and wealth...

A new theory of entrepreneurial effort demonstrates that reducing liquidity constraints may retard the performance of the self-employed. A two dimensional empirical approach then distinguishes the impact of human and financial capital on both the number and performance of the self-employed. This...

Principal-agent analysis is applied to contemporary evidence on venture capital investment. The investor (as principal) and investee (as agent) are analysed in terms of risk management, information handling and the trading of risk and information. Investors and investees were paired in 'dyads',...

This paper tests the effect of founder’s tenure on firm performance by taking into account the impact of the changes occurring in the economic environment. We use a large dataset of founder-run firms that includes, in addition to financial data, company data directly collected through a survey...

The paper was written for ERNI's first conference on entrepreneurship in Ireland and was aimed at facilitating multi-disciplinary research on the subject. It conducts a synthesis of the current forms of economic thought on entrepreneurship and also carries out introductory empirical analysis of...