Showing papers by "Sameeksha Desai published in 2021"

Refugee entrepreneurship : context and directions for future research

Abstract: This article provides an overview of future directions for research related to refugee entrepreneurship. It puts forward key concepts, explores the relations within the current broader literature on migration and entrepreneurship, and identifies several promising clusters of questions. We also introduce five papers in a special section of this issue, which offer nuanced findings and cues for further research.

Necessity or opportunity? Government size, tax policy, corruption, and implications for entrepreneurship

Abstract: Government size, corruption, and tax policy can influence allocation towards necessity or opportunity-driven entrepreneurship. Using a comparative multi-source sample across 52 countries during 2005–2015, we apply a mixed-process estimation of the simultaneously unrelated system of equations and unpack these heterogeneous and complex effects. Interestingly, our results show that the influence of tax policy and corruption on necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship depends on government size. Our results hold for numerous robustness analyses. Institutions matter for the choice of opportunity and necessity-driven entrepreneurship. Government size, the level of corruption, and tax policy directly affect entrepreneurs’ motivation and incentives. We study 52 countries during 2005–2015 to find out to what extent tax rate, corruption, and a range of government expenditure change the allocation of necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship. Our main implications are for (1) Research: Formal and informal institutions need to be considered when studying entrepreneurship allocation, particularly in an emerging and developing country context. Results suggest that the impact of the same institutional settings and informal institutions such as corruption on necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship is not uniform in size and scope and have different magnitude. The effect of government expenditure on necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship is not ubiquitous. (2) Management: The broader institutional context affects allocation of entrepreneurship, and potential entrepreneurs can consider how corruption in particular can affect them. (3) Policy: Policymakerscan measure the extent to which opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship are likely to change, when they make changes to tax policy, resources for public spending, and take anti-corruption measures.

Female ownership, firm age and firm growth: a study of South Asian firms

Abstract: This study investigates the role of female ownership, and its moderating role in shaping the effect of firm age and access to finance on firm growth. We use a sample of 7203 firms in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan and a mixed effects model, where both firm and regional characteristics are included. First, we test how women’s ownership affects two measures of firm growth (employment growth and Birch Index). Second, we investigate how women’s ownership influences the relationship between firm age and access to finance for firm growth. Our results indicate that gender is an important determinant of firm growth, but this is closely tied to firm age, access to finance, and varies with region and country. We conduct a robustness check using firm productivity instead of growth and we find largely opposite results for productivity compared to employment growth ownership. We also identify questions that emerge from our findings for managers and policy makers interested in women-owned firms.

Small business and poverty: evidence from post-Soviet cities

Abstract: The relationship between small business and poverty is inadequately substantiated, despite being an important economic and social nexus. We test the direct impact of small business on poverty, and ...

National Report on Early-Stage Entrepreneurship in the United States: 2020

Abstract: The Kauffman Indicators of Early-Stage Entrepreneurship is a set of measures that represents new business creation in the United States, integrating several high-quality, timely sources of information on early-stage entrepreneurship. This report presents four indicators that track early-stage entrepreneurship for the years 1996–2020: rate of new entrepreneurs reflects the number of new entrepreneurs in a given month, opportunity share of new entrepreneurs is the percentage of new entrepreneurs who created their businesses out of opportunity instead of necessity, startup early job creation is the total number of jobs created by startups per capita, and startup early survival rate is the one-year average survival rate for new firms. National trends are reported for the four indicators as well as some demographic trends for the rate of new entrepreneurs and opportunity share of new entrepreneurs. The rate of new entrepreneurs was substantially higher in 2020 than in 2019 or in previous years, reflecting more transitions into entrepreneurial activity, broadly defined, among the population during pandemic conditions. At the same time, the opportunity share of this activity plummeted to the lowest share in 25 years, indicating that many of these transitions were undertaken by people with few other options for economic engagement.

Stickiness of entrepreneurs: an exploratory study of migration in two mid-sized US cities

Abstract: What makes a place desirable is the subject of much debate. We conduct a mixed methods analysis on two mid-sized US cities—Indianapolis and Kansas City. We use a migration analysis to understand the flow of the general population, creative workers, and entrepreneurs, followed by an exploratory qualitative analysis of impactful entrepreneurs. Our migration analysis shows that these cities are gaining population overall as well as creative workers and entrepreneurs, and our exploratory qualitative analysis shows that entrepreneurs broadly value quality of life factors, including social and family reasons. Our analysis suggests that entrepreneurs are less mobile than the general population, and that they start companies where they live. We discuss the implications of our study for the broader debate on what makes cities attractive and for further refinement of multidimensionality in the urban amenities literature. Entrepreneurs and creative workers are less mobile than the general population in two mid-sized American cities. We study migration trends of the general population, creative workers, and entrepreneurs in Indianapolis and Kansas City, supplemented with exploratory interviews of impactful entrepreneurs. We find that entrepreneurs are “sticky” in both contexts, and that the reasons for location can be tied to quality of life overall. Our findings have implications for research, which can further investigate the multidimensionality of attractiveness of place, and for policy, which can consider the needs of entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs.