Recent initiatives in a number of countries have sought to promote entrepreneurship through relaxing the legal consequences of personal bankruptcy. Whilst there is an intuitive link, relatively little attention has been paid to the question empirically, particularly in the international context....

Must policymakers seeking to replicate the success of Silicon Valley's venture capital market first copy other US institutions, such as deep and liquid stock markets? Or can legislative reforms alone make a significant difference? In this paper, we compare the economic and legal determinants of...

This paper investigates the internal versus external financing decisions among 1900 early stage privately held UK firms in 1996-1997. We study the factors that affect rejection rates in applications for outside finance among the different types of investors, taking into account the...