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Informal investors play a key role to meet the financing needs of business projects in early stages. However, this is a group in which there are different kinds and ways of dealing with investment. One of these profiles is associated with the figure known as business angel, whose main distinguishing feature is its ability to add smart capital in the form of knowledge, experience and contacts. The aim of this paper is to determine to what extent the specific profile of business angels differ from the rest of informal investors. With a sample of over 800 informal investors in Spain, the empirical results of this study show that the higher income, skills and entrepreneurial training and the less family ties to the entrepreneur, the greater the probability of belonging to business angel investment group.

The theoretical literature has explored the potential benefits of the interaction between universities and entrepreneurs and there is some empirical evidence that supports the positive impact of entrepreneurship education in the subsequent propensity to become an entrepreneur. The purpose of this paper is study if higher education for entrepreneurship is reflected in entrepreneurship activities at the regional level. Replicating the methodology used by Coduras, Urban, Rojas and Martínez (2008) in Spain, we compare, in an exploratory way, the experience in Chile using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). The main results indicate that there is low interaction between entrepreneurs and universities and there is not enough impact to significantly affect entrepreneurial activity. Moreover, entrepreneurship education does not increase intentions to be an entrepreneur.

This paper explores the contribution of a selection of elements representative of human capital and perception as determinants of entrepreneurship in different stages of the economic cycle. The results confirm the significance of self efficacy, the perception of opportunities, and the fear of failure, and highlight the importance of personal knowledge of entrepreneurs. They remain influential in different economic times in which their analyses have been replicated, although some differences are felt that point to, in contraction periods, a loss of influence of the confidence in one’s own abilities, compared to an increase in the case of judgment on the existence of opportunities in the environment, and in the case of the presence of entrepreneurs in the surrounding context. In contrast, the behavior of the fear of failure, as a barrier to entrepreneurship, remains unchanged in an adverse context with respect to a positive context due to reduced opportunity costs.

This paper aims to identify the institutional and economic factors that influence the perception of business opportunities, and the latter’s influence on entrepreneurial intention. We use an institutional approach for the Spanish Autonomous Regions for the period 2004-2010, based on the data available in the regional GEM reports, supplemented by data from the INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística - Spanish National Institute of Statistics). By applying a structural equation model, we observed that the perception of abilities (self-efficacy) positively and significantly affects both the perception of opportunities and entrepreneurial intention, and that the perception of opportunities affects entrepreneurial intention.