Using 2005 firm level data for 26 ECA countries, this paper estimates performance gaps between male- and female-owned businesses, while controlling for their location by industry and country. We find that female entrepreneurs have significantly smaller scale of operations (as measured by sales...

Nearly a quarter of Mexico's workforce is self employed. In the United States, however, rates of self employment among Mexican Americans are only 6 percent, about half the rate among non-Latino whites. Using data from the Mexican and U.S. population census, we show that neither industrial...

Immigrants are widely perceived as being highly entrepreneurial and important for economic growth and innovation. This is reflected in immigration policies and many developed countries have created special visas and entry requirements in an attempt to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Not...

Does Protestantism favour the market economy more than Catholicism does? We provide a novel quasi-experimental way to answer this question by comparing Protestant and Catholic minorities using Swiss census data from 1970 to 2000. Exploiting the strong adhesion of religious minorities to their...

We are the first to provide a comparative empirical analysis of non-farm entrepreneurship in rural Africa, using the World Bank's unique LSMSISA dataset. This dataset covers six countries over the period 2005 to 2012. We find that rural enterprises tend to be small, informal household...

Over half of all workers in the developing world are self-employed. Although some self-employment is chosen by entrepreneurs with well-defined projects and ambitions, roughly two thirds results from individuals having no better alternatives. The importance of self-employment in the overall...

The productivity of non-farm enterprises in rural Africa may be associated with the productivity of other spatially proximate farm and non-farm enterprises. To test for the presence and significance of such spatial autocorrelation we use data from the geo-referenced 2011 Ethiopian Rural...

We refine modelling of the radical innovation decision in this paper by extending real option theory to include non-marginal stochastic jump processes. From the model analytics we determine that the average magnitude and frequency of non-marginal stochastic jump processes are the most important...

In recent years, the economics of migration literature has shown a substantial growth in papers exploring host country impacts beyond the labour market. Specifically, researchers have begun to shift their attention from labour market and fiscal changes, towards exploring what we might call...

We ask whether local agglomeration affects how recessions impact on entrepreneurship by comparing the probability of being an entrepreneur before and after the Great 2008 Recession in local labour markets where industrial districts are present and in comparable areas. Using Italian Labour Force...