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This paper presents a novel approach to capture ‘buzz’, the vibrancy and knowledge exchange propensity of localised informal communication flows. Building on a conceptual framework based on relational economic geography, we argue the content of buzz may allow to probe into the character of places and investigate what is ‘in the air’ within regional entrepreneurial milieux. In particular, we analyse big data to listen for the presence of buzz about innovation – defined by discursive practices that reflect an innovative atmosphere – and explore how this may influence regional firm creation. Using information from 180 million geolocated Tweets comprising almost two billion words across NUTS3 regions in the UK for the year 2014, our results offer novel evidence, robust to different model specifications, that regions characterised by a relatively higher intensity of discussion and vibrancy around topics related to innovation may provide a more effective set of informal resources for sharing and recombination of ideas, defining regional capabilities to support and facilitate entrepreneurial processes. The findings contribute to the literature on the intangible dimensions in the geography of innovation and offer new insights on the potential of natural language processing for economic geography research.

This study examines the relationship among experiential entrepreneurship pedagogy, entrepreneurial competencies and employment status of business graduates in two European countries. A proposed mod...

Trust is a critical component of our relationship with others. It forms a basis of not only social relations but also economic ones. Trust is necessarily linked to entrepreneurship because it is useful in conditions of uncertainty. An entrepreneur needs to gain trust of others who cannot obtain full knowledge on what is being introduced to the market as well trust others such as partners, employees and suppliers to deliver on promises. This study aims to examine the role of trust in entrepreneurship. After reviewing the conceptualisation of trust, we argue that trust should be seen in the context of a wider-set of entrepreneurship-supporting values. We then explore different types of trust and their role in entrepreneurship, moving from particular trust to extended trust, ending with a discussion on how new technology is enabling entrepreneurs to create a new form of distributed trust between strangers.

We examine the impact of nascent entrepreneurs’ human capital, both general and specific, and of their age, on the duration of the business start-up process until a positive (profitable) outcome. W...

In order to understand how the environment influences business owner/managers’ attitudes towards tax morale, we build a theoretical model based on a neo-institutionalist framework. Our model combines three complementary perspectives on institutions—normative, cultural–cognitive and regulatory–instrumental. This enables a broader understanding of factors that influence business owner–managers’ attitudes towards tax evasion. We test the resulting hypotheses using regression analysis on survey data on business owner/managers in Latvia—a transition country, which has undergone massive institutional changes since it was part of the Soviet Union over 25 years ago. We find that legitimacy of the tax authorities and the government (normative dimension), feeling of belonging to the nation (cultural–cognitive dimension) and perceptions of the risk and severity of punishment (regulatory–instrumental dimension) are all associated with higher tax morale for business owners and managers.

We apply prospect theory to explain how personal and corporate bankruptcy laws affect risk perceptions of entrepreneurs at time of entry and therefore their growth ambitions. Previous theories have reached ambiguous conclusions as to whether countries with more debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws (i.e. laws that are more forgiving towards debtors in bankruptcy proceedings) are likely to have more entrepreneurs, or whether, creditor-friendly regimes have positive effects on new ventures via enhanced incentives for the supply of credit to entrepreneurs. Responding to this ambiguity, we apply prospect theory to propose that entrepreneurs do not attach the same significance to different elements of bankruptcy codes—and to explain which aspects of debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws matter more to entrepreneurs. Based on this, we derive and confirm hypotheses about the impact of aspects of bankruptcy codes on entrepreneurial activity using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor combined with data on both personal and corporate bankruptcy regulations for 15 developed OECD countries. We use multilevel random coefficient logistic regressions to take account of the hierarchical nature of the data (country and individual levels). Because entrepreneurs and creditors are sensitive to different elements of the codes, there is scope for optimisation of the legal design of bankruptcy law to achieve both an adequate supply of credit and to encourage high-ambition entrepreneurship.

In this paper, we explore how to expand our knowledge of informal relational structures and how they influence entrepreneurship by analysing big data to listen to the ‘buzz’ – the vibrancy and knowledge exchange propensity of localised informal communication flows. In particular, we propose a novel approach to capture the intangible element of learning regions, reminiscent of the ‘industrial atmosphere’ discussed by Marshall, within the framework of the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship. Using all geo-tagged Tweets across 168 NUTS3 regions in the UK for the year 2014, our results offer evidence, robust to different model specifications, that regions characterised by a relatively higher intensity of discussion and vibrancy around topics related to innovation may provide a more effective set of informal relational resources for sharing and recombination of ideas, defining regional capabilities to support and facilitate entrepreneurial processes.

Over the last decade, European universities have been swiftly increasing the supply of enterprise education modules across all disciplines and embedding enterprise into non-business studies. There ...

We explore the social determinants of growth aspirations of young firms’ owners and managers in a post-conflict economy. We focus on social capital, which we treat as a multi-dimensional phenomenon, studying not only the effect of owners’ and managers’ personal networks on growth aspirations, but also other facets that facilitate cooperation such as trust in institutions and generalised trust in people. We posit that that the generalised trust amplifies the beneficial effects of personal business networks, explaining how this conclusion diverges from earlier literature. We argue that in a post-conflict country, preservation of ethnic diversity is indicative of tolerance and low communication barriers and social capital appropriable for entrepreneurship. Our empirical counterpart and hypotheses testing rely on survey of young businesses in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In this paper, we present results of the quantitative analysis, which examines a relationship between learning outcomes of entrepreneurship education (EE) and occupational status choices of Bachelo...

We utilize concepts of legality, legitimacy, government effectiveness, trust and identity to develop hypotheses about antecedents of tax morale. We rely on the institutional approach that links the cognitive and normative aspects. We posit that tax morale of business owner-managers is related to their beliefs about political and tax institutions. We also argue that as well as looking at macro level, one needs to consider the micro level factors and meso level social structures, in particular: norms of behavior observed in the close neighborhood of the entrepreneur. We test our hypotheses based on survey data on owners-managers of Latvian businesses.

We explore theoretically and empirically how country specific bankruptcy laws may affect entrepreneurship. We consider the relationship between more finely grained elements of bankruptcy law and di...