Female Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries

Women, Entrepreneurship, Developing Countries

Not for Lack of Trying: American Entrepreneurship in Black and White

Using a sample obtained from a survey conducted in the United States during summer 2002, we study the variables related to observed differences in the rate of entrepreneurial involvement between black and white Americans. We find strong evidence that differences in subjective and often biased perceptions are highly associated with entrepreneurial propensity across these two racial groups. In addition, we find that black Americans tend to exhibit more optimistic perceptions of their business environment than other racial groups and are more likely than others to attempt starting a business. In fact, our results show that blacks are almost twice as likely as whites to try starting a business. Thus, our results suggest that the under representation of black Americans among established entrepreneurs is not due to lack of trying but may instead be due to stronger barriers to entry and higher failure rates.Entrepreneurship, Black Entrepreneurship, Minority Entrepreneurship, Nascent Entrepreneurship.

"I Think I Can, I Think I Can": Overconfidence and Entrepreneurial Behavior

Many firms fail shortly after inception. Yet individuals continue starting businesses. Prewar economists such as Keynes invoked animal spirits and stressed psychological factors in their explanations of economic behavior. Using a large sample obtained from surveys conducted in 18 countries, we study what variables have a significant impact on an individual's decision to start a business. We find strong evidence that subjective, and often biased, perceptions have a crucial impact on new business creation across all countries in our sample. Our findings are consistent with the idea that individuals rely significantly on their perceptions rather than on objective probabilities, evaluate their businesses prospects by taking an overconfident "inside view" of their situation, and, as a result, overestimate their likelihood of success.Entrepreneurship; Self-employment; Perceptions; Perceptual variables; Overconfidence

Entrepreneurial Overconfidence: Evidence from a C.A.R.T. Approach

We use a sample of 18 countries to study what variables have a significant impact on an individual's decision to start a new business and classification and regression trees for an accurate interpretation of the data. Our results support existing literature suggesting the existence of strong country effects. In addition, we find strong evidence that perceptual variables, such as one's belief about her own skills and ability and about the risk involved in the venture, have a crucial impact on new business creation across all countries in our sample. Our findings are consistent with the idea that entrepreneurs evaluate their businesses by taking an "inside view" of their situation, overestimate their likelihood of success, and, as a result, rely significantly on perceptions rather than on objective expectations of success.CARTs; Entrepreneurship; Overconfidence; Self-employment

Whole-Body MPC for a Dynamically Stable Mobile Manipulator

Autonomous mobile manipulation offers a dual advantage of mobility provided by a mobile platform and dexterity afforded by the manipulator. In this paper, we present a whole-body optimal control framework to jointly solve the problems of manipulation, balancing and interaction as one optimization problem for an inherently unstable robot. The optimization is performed using a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach; the optimal control problem is transcribed at the end-effector space, treating the position and orientation tasks in the MPC planner, and skillfully planning for end-effector contact forces. The proposed formulation evaluates how the control decisions aimed at end-effector tracking and environment interaction will affect the balance of the system in the future. We showcase the advantages of the proposed MPC approach on the example of a ball-balancing robot with a robotic manipulator and validate our controller in hardware experiments for tasks such as end-effector pose tracking and door opening

What Do We Know About The Patterns and Determinants of Female Entrepreneurship Across Countries?

In this article we provide an introduction to the papers in the special section of this edition of the european journal of development research. We start by framing the challenges posed by female entrepreneurship to the research community, note some of the findings in the literature pertaining to the cross-national understanding of female entrepreneurship, and review the existing literature on the role and experience of female entrepreneurs in developing countries. Despite progress in understanding the motivations, constraints and issues that confront female entrepreneurs, there is still substantial scope for further research. We then discuss four papers that advance this research agenda

Microlensing events in the Galactic bulge

For the first time we detected microlensing events at zero latitude in the Galactic bulge using the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV) data. We have discovered a total sample of N = 630 events within an area covering 20.7 sq. deg. Using the near-IR color magnitude diagram we selected N = 291 red clump sources, allowing us to analyse the longitude dependence of microlensing across the central region of the Galactic plane. We thoroughly accounted for the photometric and sampling efficiency. The spatial distribution is homogeneous, with the number of events smoothly increasing toward the Galactic center. We find a slight asymmetry, with a larger number of events toward negative longitudes than positive longitudes, that is possibly related with the inclination of the bar along the line of sight. We also examined the timescale distribution which shows a mean on 17.4 +- 1.0 days for the whole sample, and 20.7 +- 1.0 for the Red Clump subsample.Comment: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Marcel Grossman Meeting on General Relativity Edited by Elia Battistelli, Robert T. Jantzen, and Remo Ruffini. 6 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Open access e-book proceedings World Scientific, Singapore, 201

Late-career entrepreneurship, income and quality of life

Late-career transitions to entrepreneurship are discussed as a promising way to address some of the problematic implications of population aging. By extending employment choice theory to simultaneously account for career stage and for non-monetary rewards from entrepreneurship, we investigate how late-career transitions from organizational employment to entrepreneurship influence the returns from the monetary (income) and non-monetary (quality of life) components of an individual's utility. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, our empirical analysis shows that for late-career individuals, starting a business is positively associated with change in quality of life and negatively associated with change in income

Unemployment Benefits Crowd Out Nascent Entrepreneurial Activity

Analyzing a cross-country panel of 16 OECD countries from 2002 to 2005, we find that higher unemployment benefits crowd out nascent entrepreneurial activity. Our results hold regardless of entrepreneurial motivation (necessity or opportunity) and entrepreneurial type (imitative or innovative)