Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/44187 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5052
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We explore the country-specific institutional characteristics likely to influence an individual's decision to become an entrepreneur. We focus on the size of the government, on freedom from corruption, and on 'market freedom' defined as a cluster of variables related to protection of property rights and regulation. We test these relationships by combining country-level institutional indicators for 47 countries with working age population survey data taken from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Our results indicate that entrepreneurial entry is inversely related to the size of the government, and more weakly to the extent of corruption. A cluster of institutional indicators representing 'market freedom' is only significant in some specifications. Freedom from corruption is significantly related to entrepreneurial entry, especially when the richest countries are removed from the sample but unlike the size of government, the results on corruption are not confirmed by country-level fixed effects models.
Subjects: 
Entrepreneurship
government
market freedom
corruption
JEL: 
L26
P14
P51
P37
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
222.33 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.