We use data on 3,948 Chinese firms obtained from the World Bank’s Investment Climate Private Enterprise Survey to investigate early international entrepreneurship (international new ventures) in China. The extent of early international entrepreneurship in China is significant: 65 per cent of the exporting firms start export operations within three years. Foreign shareholders within the firm and...

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that the growth process of entrepreneurial firms is frequently achieved through the formation of business groups: i.e. a set of companies run by the same entrepreneur (or entrepreneurial team). The literature has put forward the hypothesis that this is the result of a growth process by diversification of the original activity. The main aim of the artic...

This paper adapts the entrepreneurial theory developed by Richard Cantillon, Frank Knight, and Ludwig von Mises to the theory of “political entrepreneurship.” Political entrepreneurship is an outgrowth of the theory of the market entrepreneur, and derives from extending entrepreneurial theory from the market into the political sphere of action. By applying the theory of the entrepreneur to poli...

This paper tests agency theory using unique entrepreneurial effort and financing choices data. Focusing on entrepreneurs as a special type of agent, the paper develops a modified principal-agent model within a private firm setting. In line with the typical agency theory prediction, this model suggests that the severity of entrepreneur moral hazard relates to the firm’s capital structure. Specia...

Information and communication technology (ICT) has been the main focused of Malaysian government to strengthen the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the country. However, scholars in resource-based view acknowledge that sustainable competitive advantage can only be achieved through building a co-specialised ICT competence between the human factors and ICT facilities in the firm. In the con...

Who are the high-technology entrepreneurs: superheroes or jack-of-all-trades? Is there a new generation of young entrepreneurs who “think different” and use new and unexpected perspectives to imagine their business, products and mission? This paper presents some empirical evidences emerging from a multiple case study composed by 20 Italian technology intensive firms. After a review of the high-...

The debt overhang problem is shown to arise in the context of an entrepreneurial project that requires a sequence of investments financed by an outside lender. The entrepreneur, not internalizing losses accruing to the lender which financed the initial investments, may inefficiently cancel the project and instead pursue an outside opportunity. It is shown that loan commitments (contracts that a...

The English-language literature of technological change is one of the few areas of economic writing in which Joseph Schumpeter has maintained a following and in which he has been accorded some modicum of the attention he deserves. There has grown up within this literature a standard interpretation of Schumpeter’s famous assertion that progress will eventually come to be ’mechanized’. The conven...

Introduction The objective of this article is to advocate that economists devote more attention to factors concerning the supply of entrepreneurs both over time and across industries. The article has four main sections which reflect the structure of our case. First we follow the well-trodden track in pursuit of the entrepreneur within economic theory. Like others, we find a degree of definition...

This paper aims to outline findings from a research project that has investigated an initiative to stimulate youths to become more entrepreneurial. The concept of summer entrepreneur has been developed in the last decade in a Swedish county. It was developed out of the idea that youths should have a possibility to run their own companies as alternative to traditional summer vacation employments...