The impact of digital start-up founders’ higher education on reaching equity investment milestones

This paper builds on human capital theory to assess the importance of formal education among graduate entrepreneurs. Using a sample of 4.953 digital start-ups the paper evaluates the impact of start-up founding teams’ higher education on the probability of securing equity investment and subsequent exit for investors. The main findings are: (1), teams with a founder that has a technical education are less likely to remain self-financed and are more likely to secure equity investment and to exit, but the impact of technical education declines with higher level degrees, (2) teams with a founder that has doctoral level business education are less likely to remain self-financed and have a higher probability of securing equity investment, while undergraduate and postgraduate business education have no significant effect, and (3) teams with a founder that has an undergraduate general education (arts and humanities) are less likely to remain self-financed and are more likely to secure equity investment and exit while postgraduate and doctoral general education have no significant effect on securing equity investment and exit. The findings enhance our understanding of factors that influence digital start-ups achieving equity milestones by showing the heterogeneous influence of different types of higher education, and therefore human capital, on new ventures achieving equity milestones. The results suggest that researchers and policy-makers should extend their consideration of universities entrepreneurial activity to include the development of human capital

Productive entrepreneurship and the effectiveness of insolvency legislation: a cross-country study

This paper studies the association between the effectiveness of insolvency regulations and entrepreneurship using multilevel modeling of about 300,000 individuals in 27 countries over the 2005-2010 period. We investigate the relationship between three different measures of "resolving insolvency" (time, cost, and recovery rate) from the World Bank and four different measures of entrepreneurship from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, controlling for relevant individual- and country-level facets. We find that opportunity-driven and innovation-oriented entrepreneurs are more severely affected by onerous insolvency regulations than necessity-motivated entrepreneurs. However, entrepreneurs envisioning rapid employment growth are not affected by onerous insolvency regulations. We discuss contributions to comparative entrepreneurship research and public policy.Funding Agencies|Swedish Research CouncilSwedish Research Council [DNR 340-2013-5460]</p