Fostering Enterprise

This chapter uses an evolutionary lens to depict a journey that is also a destination for a lifelong learner passionate about upward mobility in intellectual, psychological, and economic realms. A mainstay of the research endeavors has been the study of innovation and enterprise. Starting as an economist studying the evolution of technologies and industries, the scholarly journey progressed to strategic management to examine firm and industry evolution and then to strategic entrepreneurship to examine individual, firm, and industry evolution. Currently, the research focuses on the interplay of enterprise and markets through an integration of economics, psychology, and sociology perspectives to understand the causes and consequences of enterprising individuals, organizations, and economies.

International Entrepreneurship: An Entrepreneurial Behavior Oriented to the Pursuit of International Opportunities

International entrepreneurship (IE) research draws on the notion that internationalization is an entrepreneurial behavior oriented to the discovery, enactment, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities across national borders to create value and get a competitive advantage. Based on the clear emphasis on opportunity-focused behaviors, IE research has made progress and extended its domain and boundaries to an extent that the mechanisms operating throughout the international opportunity process can be described. The present chapter aims to depict antecedents, mechanisms, and outcomes of this entrepreneurial behavior oriented to the pursuit of international opportunities and it offers directions for future research. As such, the chapter makes four contributions. First, it outlines antecedents at three levels (individual, firm, and environmental) as driving aspects that lead to the international opportunity-related behavior. Second, it reveals the mechanism by which different actors discover, enact, evaluate, and exploit international opportunities. Third, it describes the outcomes of this opportunities process. Fourth, it suggests establishing a conceptual basis around one previously proposed definition incorporating a notion of a social context that would enable IE scholarly community to set the objective criteria around opportunities and go beyond the legal entity of the focal firm and consider multiple actors, resources, processes, history, and context. Finally, the chapter offers some theoretical contributions by proposing directions for future research.

Value of Aggregators

Aggregators are facing increased scrutiny by regulatory authorities, suggesting these sites have considerable market power. On the other extreme, firms are bypassing aggregators, choosing instead to sell directly to consumers. This raises the question as to which party has more market power: the aggregator or the individual firm. Focusing on the airline industry, we investigate who benefits most in the airline-aggregator relationship. Specifically, we ask what would happen to airline and aggregator site visits and purchases in the absence of a comprehensive aggregator. We first explore consumers’ search patterns on Southwest, an airline that has never been part of any aggregator. In a descriptive exercise, we find that consumers who book on Southwest are the least likely to visit aggregator sites. Second, we use the 2011 American dispute with Orbitz as an exogenous event, which led to American fares no longer being displayed on Orbitz for five months. We use this dispute to identify who was hurt the most—the aggregator or the airline—in the months following the dispute. Our findings indicate the aggregator loses the most when it is not comprehensive.

Is there discrimination against the agricultural sector in the credit rationing behavior of commercial banks in Ghana?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine if credit rationing persists even in the era of financial liberalization, the extent to which individual, firm and loan characteristics influence the rationing behavior of commercial banks and whether the agricultural sector is discriminated against in the commercial bank credit market. Design/methodology/approach The study employed a probit model with marginal effects and a generalized Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition estimation on a randomly selected data of 1,239 entrepreneurs from eight commercial banks’ credit records about their individual, firm and loan characteristics. Findings The study revealed that credit rationing persists and that applying for a relatively longer payment period, providing collateral and guarantor, being illiterate, being relatively older and being in the agricultural sector increases the likelihood of being credit rationed, while having some relationship with the bank, having non-mandatory savings and applying from a bank with relatively high interest rates reduce the likelihood of being credit rationed. The study also revealed a credit gap of 17.77 percent and a positive discrimination against borrowers in the agricultural sector as the gap was largely being influenced by unexplained factors. Research limitations/implications The research was intended to cover a large number of commercial banks in Ghana. However, most of the banks were unwilling to provide such information about their borrowers; hence, the research was limited to only eight commercial banks who provided the author with the information needed for the study. Practical implications The study concludes that policies that enhance human capital, women, and older access to credit and agricultural-oriented financial services and others, will go a long way to reduce rationing and increase access to credit, especially to the agricultural sector. Social implications The research proposes the use of group lending as a form of collateral and monitoring to ease risks and default, and hence supports sustainable funding to increase access and outreach. Originality/value The paper looks at the comprehensive way about the various factors determining credit rationing in that it considers not only the individual, economic/firm and loan characteristics but also the extent to which discrimination toward the agricultural sector exists in the commercial banks credit market.

Mind The (Profit) Gap: Why Are Female Enterprise Owners Earning Less than Men?

We explore potential causes for the well-documented profit gap between male- and female-owned microenterprises in low-income countries. We use rich data from an ongoing field project in Ghana's garment making sector, and our study sample consists of all garment making firms in a midsize district capital. Even within the same industry, male-owned firms earn nearly twice as much profit as female-owned firms. Furthermore, we find the large and persistent gender difference in profits cannot be explained by our extensive firm- and owner-level characteristics. We conclude that factors outside of individual firm or firm-owner characteristics are likely to be at play.