دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تثبیت رکود اقتصادی و کارآفرینی: شواهد از اسپانیا - الزویر 2018

Abstract

This article aims to gain a better understanding of the relationship between economic recession and entrepreneurship. The process of entrepreneurship, rather than the action itself, is a complex phenomenon, and such complexity surfaces when local context conditions worsen after an economic recession. This paper addresses the issue of how the likelihood of individuals to engage in the creation of new firms is affected by a recessionary climate. Furthermore, the study focuses on how the recession-driven shake-out effect varies across local contexts (i.e., sub-national regions). The case of Spain in the critical period of 2007---2010 is examined by using multilevel logistic mediation models on individual-level and sub-national region-level panel data. The results show that entrepreneurship shrinks during economic downturns, suggesting a pro-cyclical trend. A weaker perception by individuals of business opportunities resulting from the shake-out explains, to a large extent, the lower propensity to create firms during economic recession.

Conclusion

While there are numerous stylized facts on firm entry, exit, survival and growth (Geroski, 1995), the literature has not resolved yet the long debate on the relationship between business cycles and entrepreneurship. Most studies support the opinion that such a relationship is complex, and the subject still warrants further research (Acs and Storey, 2004; Audretsch and Pena-Legazkue, ˜ 2011; Fritsch, 2008). Our findings suggest that economic context matters for the process, rather than the action, of entrepreneurship. Specifically, a recession-driven shakeout generates a decline in entrepreneurship, and our mediation tests reflect that lower entrepreneurial activity is to some extent explained by a reduced opportunity perception of individuals during recessionary periods. Rather than a full direct effect of the economic shakeout on entrepreneurial activity, consistent with cognitive and planned behaviour theories, we empirically demonstrated that this relationship is partially mediated through a lower and more pessimistic opportunity perception, which leads to a drop in entrepreneurial action. The paper is not without limitations. Only one proxy has been used to describe the recession shakeout effect (e.g., changes in unemployment rate of regions as in the study by Fritsch et al., 2015), and the study is limited to the case of Spain during a precise economic recessionary period (2007---2010). Although the results can be seen as solid and valid enough as several additional tests for robustness were conducted (e.g., findings were similar when other proxies of the current crisis were considered, such as changes in GDP per capita), we suggest that further studies should be undertaken in other geographical contexts to authenticate our entrepreneurial process view.