Essays in entrepreneurial finance

Abstract

There is growing belief that countries with better financing environments are associated with higher economic growth because they facilitate entrepreneurship and hence the Schumpeterian process of 'creative destruction'. This dissertation explores this hypothesis in more detail by understanding how the financing environment for new ventures impacts outcomes such as individuals' decision to become entrepreneurs, their sources of financing and the growth and survival of their firms. Rather than performing cross-country analyses however, the approach used in this dissertation is to perform within-country studies that shed more light on the mechanisms through which the financing environment impacts entrepreneurial activity. The first two essays in the dissertation exploit institutional reforms - one in Denmark and another in the US - that changed the financing environment for new businesses to study how they impacted individuals' entry and survival. These natural experiments are supplemented with detailed and comprehensive micro data that allow me to both explore and the refine the mechanisms at play in more detail. The final paper is more descriptive in nature and examines how the variation in entrepreneurs' use of Diaspora networks in developing countries is related to the financing and networking environment of the city in which they are based.