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Previous research has focused on the economic effects of entrepreneurship, but little is known about how promoting entrepreneurship affects societies. Focusing on community crime as a key societal outcome, we posit that initiatives fostering new venture creation through lower barriers to entrepreneurship will reduce crime. The proposed mechanism responsible for this effect is the enhanced socio-economic integration of disadvantaged groups within the community. This mechanism is enabled through multiple channels: lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship improves labor market opportunities for disadvantaged groups as founders of their own firms and joiners of new startups, or, more indirectly, as new hires at incumbent firms. Leveraging employer-employee matched data from Portugal between 2002 and 2010 and an exogenous deregulation reform that significantly increased entrepreneurial activity, we find strong support for our theory. Reducing barriers to entrepreneurship reduces within-community crime, and this result is further amplified in communities with higher socio-economic exclusion figures. We find significant reductions in different types of crime, although the magnitude, timing, and persistence of the effects varies, which gives important insights into the different integration mechanisms at play.

Ample research has documented that female founders are disadvantaged in entrepreneurship, but few theories explain how their disadvantage carries over into later stages of the entrepreneurial process. We combine evidence from longitudinal matched employer-employee data covering all founders of new ventures with personnel in Portugal between 2002 and 2012 with two online experiments to document a novel source of disadvantage for female founders: employee labor imbalance. We propose that female-founded ventures receive a lower amount of employee labor for equal pay because employees are more likely to decline requests for additional labor by female founders. First, using observational data, we confirm that full-time employees contribute fewer regular hours and less overtime work to female-founded firms. Second, using a series of online experiments, we show that this variation in employee labor across female and male-founded firms is partly motivated by a difference in the employee’s expectations of work demands. Specifically, employees perceive female founders’ requests for additional labor to be unfair and more difficult than expected, and both of these perceptions explain the lower amount of employee labor supplied in female-founded ventures. Overall, our findings uncover a novel mechanism that helps explain the existence of a gender gap in entrepreneurship beyond the entry stage.

This paper evaluates the link between foreign ownership and firm exit during crises, using a longitudinal micro dataset over an 18-year period. We address two main questions: first, if foreign affiliates have different failure rates than domestic firms during economic downturns, and second if the foreignness effect differs between two different economic downturns. The results partially confirm the liability of foreignness argument, suggesting that when the crisis was more pronounced at home than abroad, the differences in hazard rates between foreign and domestic firms reduce. The footloose argument is also only partially confirmed. For policy makers, our results on survival dynamics during crises are not against policies stimulating inward investment. There is no need to fear that foreign firms destabilize more than usual the host economy during economic slowdowns by immediately closing down operations.

We adopt a process-based approach to investigate the influence of entrepreneurial bosses on the two main decisions of employees towards becoming entrepreneurs: exit from the current firm and entry into entrepreneurship. In other words, we study the push and pull mechanisms possibly underlying the influence of entrepreneurial bosses. We do so by employing an identification strategy based on comparisons of same-gender matches of bosses and employees, using rich register data for Denmark. We show that same-gender entrepreneurial bosses have a great impact on employees' future entrepreneurship choices, especially among women. We do not find any evidence that female bosses push female employees out of the workplace, by creating a discriminatory environment that forces them to search for alternative career paths. Instead, our analysis finds consistent support for pull mechanisms, with role modeling being the main explanation for the positive influence of female entrepreneurial bosses on female employees' transition into entrepreneurship. We show that the female boss effect is greater than other social interactions identified in prior research. We conclude that entrepreneurial bosses can be role models and female entrepreneurial bosses may thus act as a lever to reducing gender gaps in entrepreneurship rates.