Jobs, Gender and Small Enterprises: Getting the Policy Environment Right

Among the most substantial drivers for the discovery and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities is acquiring proper capabilities on the part of the entrepreneur. As such, entrepreneurial self-efficacy is a significant antecedent for entrepreneurship engagement. According to the relevant literature, early entrepreneurship research only studied entrepreneur’s individual traits. Subsequently, researchers change their focused of studies towards environmental context. While both streams of research have contributed to our understanding, the joint influence of these two sets of antecedents has been largely ignored. The central premise of this research is that we need to understand both individual traits as well as the environmental context in order to truly understand the embedded nature of entrepreneurial self-efficacy. In other words, we argue that entrepreneurs are both born and made. We test our predictions using hierarchical linear modeling methods for 128,000 entrepreneurs based in 55 countries.

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