Financing Constraints and Entrepreneurship
23 November 2009 at 9:48 am Peter G. Klein 5 comments
| Peter Klein |
Speaking of banks, here’s a very good survey of the entrepreneurship literature on financing constraints by William Kerr and Ramana Nanda, just out from NBER. From the introduction:
The first research stream considers the impact of financial market development on entrepreneurship. These papers usually employ variations across regions to examine how differences in observable characteristics of financial sectors (e.g., the level of competition among banks, the depth of credit markets) relate to entrepreneurs’ access to finance and realized rates of firm formation. The second stream employs variations across individuals to examine how propensities to start new businesses relate to personal wealth or recent changes therein. The notion behind this second line of research is that an association of individual wealth and propensity for self-employment or firm creation should be observed only if financial constraints for entrepreneurship exist.
These two streams of research have remained mostly separate literatures within economics, driven in large part by the different levels of analysis. Historically their general results have been mostly complementary. More recently, however, empirical research using individual-level variation has questioned the extent to which financing constraints are important for entrepreneurship in advanced economies. This new work argues that the strong associations between the financial resources of individuals and entrepreneurship observed in previous studies are driven to large extents by unobserved heterogeneity rather than substantive financing constraints. These contrarian studies have led to renewed interest and debate in how financing environments impact entrepreneurship in product markets.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Entrepreneurship, Financial Markets, Institutions.
1.
David Croson | 23 November 2009 at 11:18 am
Link for free download (without the moronic “We’re NBER, so we can charge $5 for a free paper” fee:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1447503
I hope the authors get a big cut of this $5, because it’s costing them cites — and dampening the effect of Peter’s free publicity for them.
2.
Peter Klein | 23 November 2009 at 11:24 am
Thanks David, I should have provided the SSRN link — too lazy. It would be nice if somebody would write a little script or Firefox plug-in to find free versions of firewalled papers with a click or two.
3.
Lasse | 24 November 2009 at 8:42 am
Thanks, nothing gives me a bigger consumer surplus than a good, free survey article!
4.
Peter Klein | 24 November 2009 at 9:17 am
But doesn’t your heart ache for NBER’s lost producer surplus?
5.
Michael Imhof | 24 November 2009 at 12:25 pm
Great paper, thanks for the post and the link to the freebie ;)