Prospect theory and the effects of bankruptcy laws on entrepreneurial aspirations

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, creditorfriendly 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 bankruptcyregulations 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

Terrorism and Global Business Performance

This paper contributes to the literature on business performance by investigating the relationship between terrorism and global business performance at country level. A measure of a country's distance from the frontier score of the World Bank's Doing Business index is used to proxy for business performance. The results of the fixed-effects estimations based on 173 countries over 7 years (2009–2017) show that terrorism has no significant relationship with global business performance. We then partition our sample into developed, developing and fragile countries. The results still show that there is no robust significant relationship between terrorism and business performance for the sub-samples of developed and developing countries. However, the results based on the fragile countries' sub-sample suggest a significant negative relationship between terrorism and business performance. The results are consistent with an alternative measure of business performance and estimation technique that controls for endogeneity.</p