Reciprocated community support and small town - small business success

Maureen Kilkenny, Laura Nalbarte and Terry Besser

Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 1999, vol. 11, issue 3, 231-246

Abstract: This paper presents an empirical test of the significance of reciprocated community support, in contrast with traditional economic factors and unilateral support, in the success of small businesses in small towns. The central hypothesis is that entrepreneurs who make non-market contributions to their community and whose community supports them, are more likely to consider their businesses to be successful. Logistic regression is used to analyse survey data from over 800 small businesses in 30 small towns of the state of Iowa (USA). The authors found that the interaction effect of an entrepreneur's service to the community, reciprocated by community support of the business, is the single most significant determinant of business success among dozens of indicators and characteristics of the respondent, the business, and the small towns in the sample. In addition, it was found that business people who feel successful expect to expand. These findings are relevant to rural development. The expansion of existing businesses is an important component of regional job growth.

Date: 1999
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/089856299283182 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Reciprocated Community Support and Small Town-Small Business Success (1999)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:entreg:v:11:y:1999:i:3:p:231-246

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TEPN20

DOI: 10.1080/089856299283182

Access Statistics for this article

Entrepreneurship & Regional Development is currently edited by Professor Alistair Anderson

More articles in Entrepreneurship & Regional Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().