Do Institutions Have a Greater Effect on Female Entrepreneurs?

Saul Estrin () and Tomasz Mickiewicz
Additional contact information
Saul Estrin: London School of Economics

No 4577, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper compares the impact of institutions on individual decisions to become entrepreneurs in the form of new business start ups by males and females across 44 developed and developing economies between 1998 and 2004. We test four hypotheses; that women are less likely to undertake entrepreneurial activity in countries where the rule of law is weaker; where the state sector is larger; where the informal financial sector is weaker and where the formal financial sector is weaker. We use data from the Global Enterprise Monitor survey (GEM) which covers at least 2,000 individuals annually in each of up to 44 countries, merged with country-level data, from the WB WDI and Heritage Foundation. We start with a spectrum of institutional variables and by utilizing factor analysis prior to regression estimation models, we are able to obtain results that are more robust and address multicollinearity between the institutional measures. We find that women are less likely to undertake entrepreneurial activity in countries where the state sector is larger, and demonstrate that this result applies to both high aspiration and low aspiration entrepreneurship. We also find that women benefit more from the larger informal financial sector.

Keywords: state sector; female entrepreneurship; informal finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 J16 L26 O16 O17 P43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published - published as 'Institutions and female entrepreneurship' in: Small Business Economics, 2011, 37 (4), 397-415

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4577.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iza:izadps:dp4577

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().