The remarkable ascent of entrepreneurship witnessed as a scientific field over the last 4 decades has been made possible by entrepreneurship’s ability to absorb theories, paradigms, and methods from other fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, geography, and even biology. The respectability of entrepreneurship as an academic discipline is now evidenced by many other fields starting to borrow from the entrepreneurship view. In the present paper, seven examples are given from this “pay back” development. These examples were first presented during a seminar at the Erasmus Entrepreneurship Event called what has the entrepreneurship view to offer to other academic fields? This article elaborates on the core ideas of these presentations and focuses on the overarching question of how entrepreneurship research impacts the development of other academic fields. We found that entrepreneurship research questions the core assumptions of other academic fields and provides new insights into the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of their respective core phenomena. Moreover, entrepreneurship research helps to legitimize other academic fields both practically and academically.

research, and the emerging field of entrepreneurship (see Roy Thurik's contribution in the present article for more on this point).Those who knew David personally had been aware for some time that he was fighting a terminal illness.

We investigate the payback performance of small businesses' funded loans, and its determinants, in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending crowdfunding market. We do so by analysing a dataset of 1000 small businesses' unsecured funded loans, via the American online P2P lending funding website Prosper.com. As these loans are unsecured, interest rates are relatively high (18.5% on average in our data base). As a result, payback is by no means straightforward. Indeed, we find 27% of all funded loans in our sample to default. Hence, it is particularly important in this market to know which factors determine payback performance. A novelty of our paper is that we are able to distinguish empirically between new and established firms in this market. Our results highlight that also in P2P lending, borrower reputation — stipulated by credit grade and repayment history — continues to be the single most dominant determinant of payback over loan default, especially for established firms. However, in contrast to conventional financing theory, we found that borrowers' credit grade is only weakly relevant in determining risks of default of new businesses and that new firms are not more likely to default when compared to established firms. Selection effects may play a role here, in that only high-risk established firms look for unsecured online P2P finance as they are more likely than lower risk established firms to have been unable to get finance in the more traditional markets. This suggests that the liability of newness does not hold in this market. Nevertheless, among new firms, and in contrast to established firms, inclusion of a picture in the loan application was found to be an additional quality signal, positively associated with payback performance. This suggests the importance of visual information as a means of reducing uncertainty and signalling lower risk to financiers.

Background During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, governments imposed numerous regulations to protect public health, particularly the (mandatory) use of face masks. However, the appropriateness and effectiveness of face mask regulations have been widely discussed, as is apparent from the divergent measures taken across and within countries over time, including mandating, recommending, and discouraging their use. In this study, we analyse how country-level policy stringency and individual-level predictors associate with face mask use during the early stages of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Method First, we study how (self and other-related) risk perception, (direct and indirect) experience with COVID-19, attitude towards government and policy stringency shape face mask use. Second, we study whether there is an interaction between policy stringency and the individual-level variables. We conduct multilevel analyses exploiting variation in face mask regulations across countries and using data from approximately 7000 students collected in the beginning of the pandemic (weeks 17 through 19, 2020). Results We show that policy stringency is strongly positively associated with face mask use. We find a positive association between self-related risk perception and mask use, but no relationship of mask use with experience with COVID-19 and attitudes towards government. However, in the interaction analyses, we find that government trust and perceived clarity of communication moderate the link between stringency and mask use, with positive government perceptions relating to higher use in countries with regulations and to lower use in countries without regulations. Conclusions We highlight that those countries that aim for widespread use of face masks should set strict measures, stress self-related risks of COVID-19, and use clear communication.

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, governments set recommendations and restrictions that have given rise to new situations that require residents to deliberate and respond nonautomatically. For highly impulsive individuals, dealing with these situations may be harder, as they tend to deliberate less about the consequences of their behaviors. In this study, we investigate the relationship between impulsivity and delay discounting on the one hand and compliance with COVID-19 restrictions on the other hand. We distinguish between compliance with social distancing measures and compliance with hygiene measures. Regression analyses of an international sample of 6759 students from seven European countries reveal that the self-reported personality construct of impulsivity is negatively related to both types of compliance behavior. However, and unexpectedly, we also find a weak positive association between the discount rate-as measured by a behavioral task-and compliance. Our study highlights the importance of individual differences in impulsivity in regard to compliance with public health measures during a pandemic.

Prevailing research on individuals’ compliance with public health related behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic tends to study composite measures of multiple types of behaviours, without distinguishing between different types of behaviours. However, measures taken by governments involve adjustments concerning a range of different daily behaviours. In this study, we seek to explain students’ public health related compliance behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic by examining the underlying components of such behaviours. Subsequently, we investigate how these components relate to individual attitudes towards public health measures, descriptive norms among friends and family, and key demographics. We surveyed 7,403 university students in ten countries regarding these behaviours. Principal Components Analysis reveals that compliance related to hygiene (hand washing, coughing behaviours) is uniformly distinct from compliance related to social distancing behaviours. Regression analyses predicting Social Distancing and Hygiene lead to differences in explained variance and type of predictors. Our study shows that treating public health compliance as a sole construct obfuscates the dimensionality of compliance behaviours, which risks poorer prediction of individuals’ compliance behaviours and problems in generating valid public health recommendations. Affecting these distinct behaviours may require different types of interventions.

Freelance solo self-employed have played a transformative role in economies over the last two decades. They have grown in number in the labour market in most developed economies and enabled firms to use new business and workforce models. In this special issue, we present a selection of research which explains and provides new insights into this phenomenon. The research unearths new findings showing that freelance solo self-employed are increasingly highly educated and play a key role in driving innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation. How this interplays across dependent and independent self-employed in terms of well-being, earnings and enablement of women's work-life objectives are then explored. The problems in labour market segments involving the informal economy as well as the problem of 'false self-employment' of masked employees are also explored. In sum, the papers highlight both the importance and diversity amongst the freelance workforce and the purposes for which they are engaged by firms.

Entrepreneurial, innovative entry can have devastating effects disrupting a market. However, the many players involved including all current producers, sellers and suppliers and the often non-technological but organizational nature of the innovation may lead to a gradual restoration of the market, viz., to a new equilibrium. Entrepreneurial entry can be regarded as a disaster while the restoration towards a new equilibrium as disaster management. Hardly any empirical models have been developed in order to test these ideas. This paper conducts the first empirical dynamic simultaneous equilibrium analysis of the role of entry and exit of firms, the number of firms in an industry, and profit levels in industry dynamics. Our model enables to discriminate between the entrants’ entrepreneurial function of creating disequilibrium and their conventional role of moving the industry to a new equilibrium. Using a rich data set of the retail industry, we find that indeed entrants perform an entrepreneurial function causing long periods of disequilibrium after which a new equilibrium is attained. Notably, shocks to the entry rate have permanent effects on the industry, emphasizing the entrepreneurial function of entrants rather than their passive reactive function as postulated in classical economics.

We investigate the impact of country R&D on the allocation of self-employment across different types, where types are identified based on occupational status and start-up motive. We first conduct a literature review based on which we consider the self-employed with employees to be of higher 'quality' (in terms of their overall contribution to the economy) compared with independent own-account workers, who in turn may be considered of higher quality than dependent self-employed workers. Similarly, we also consider opportunity self-employed to be of higher quality than necessity self-employed. Our empirical analysis then shows that the level of a country's R&D expenditures increases the share of self-employed with employees and that of opportunity self-employed (i.e. the self-employment types associated with higher quality) at the cost of the shares of dependent self-employed and necessity self-employed. Higher R&D expenditures at the country level thus increase the quality of self-employment in the country.

This paper explores the extent to which information and communications technology (ICT) is used by different types of self-employed individuals and how it affects their earnings. We investigate independent own-account workers (IOA), self-employed with employees (SEwE) and dependent self-employed workers (DSEW). Using recent survey data for 35 European countries, we find that earnings rise with the level of ICT use but only from a threshold of utilisation accounting for at least 25 per cent of the time. Moreover, we find that the increase in earnings associated with ICT adoption and usage is larger for SEwE types when compared to both IOA and DSEW. Finally, we find an indirect negative inertia effect of job tenure (i.e., entrepreneurs who have been running their business for a relatively long period of time) on earnings (via low ICT adoption and use). Policy implications are also discussed.

The most dynamic economies in the world are characterised by an entrepreneurial, innovation-driven business sector. And this requires firms to unburden themselves from bureaucratic constraints and become more agile and flexible. A key, and hitherto ignored, agent in this transformative process is the freelancer. Historically considered as displaced and disenfranchised workers, we argue that many freelancers are in fact highly skilled professionals who choose this form of work organisation. Further, their role in providing specialist expertise and knowledge to the firms they engage with is critical and mutually beneficial as it allows firms to adopt more flexible and agile business models capable of responding to a dynamic and rapidly changing business environment.

Despite the growing recognition that freelancers or temporary contract workers are increasingly being used by organisations to enable them to become more dynamic and innovative, there is a lack of research exploring the extent and manner in which freelancers create value-added and affect net job change for employees. Most analyses view freelancers as substitutes for employees who compete for the same work and so add little or no value-added over that already provided by employees. More recent perspectives portray freelancers as non-competing complementary providers of differentiated labour who help create jobs for employees by enabling businesses to become more agile and entrepreneurial. We explore this empirical agenda and find that freelancers are associated with sales growth in businesses and net job creation for core employees. In the process, we also discover that in order to establish these effects, firms must achieve a critical mass of freelancers in their workforce of a scale around 11% before a positive association emerges. This finding has central relevance for managers seeking to use freelance workforce intensity to enhance business performance. Moreover, while it has some intuitive appeal, this discovery requires further research to fully understand its cause and the process generating this outcome.

We investigate whether or not the level of entrepreneurial activity in an economy is determined by the availability of freelance independent contractors in the workforce. We develop hypotheses and test them through an analysis of 75 countries from 2002 to 2012 using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database. We find freelance independent contractors promote entrepreneurial activity where typically a 10% rise in the freelance workforce causes about a 1% increase in entrepreneurial activity. The significance of this positive effect is robust for both necessity and opportunity-driven entrepreneurial types and across innovation-driven and efficiency-driven economies-but it is stronger in innovation-driven economies and also for necessity entrepreneurship. It implies that having a flexible workforce is a key ingredient to having an entrepreneurial economy. Furthermore, it indicates that orthodox research and public policy perspectives which overlook the importance of freelance independent contractors for entrepreneurship activity require a re-appraisal.

We investigate the impact of prior entrepreneurial experience on current performance of firms with employees (employer firms). We distinguish between external entrepreneurial experience obtained outside of the current firm and internal entrepreneurial experience obtained within the boundaries of the employer firm currently run. Regarding the latter we focus on a special type of prior internal experience, i.e. as an own-account worker before scaling up to employer firm. Theoretically, both types of prior entrepreneurial experience are associated with different processes of learning-by-doing. Empirically, we find that both external entrepreneurial experience and internal experience as an own-account worker enhance employer firm performance. Our results therefore imply that, for individuals without any prior entrepreneurial experience wishing to start a new firm, a lean start-up strategy (as an own-account worker) is to be preferred over a more resourceful strategy hiring employees from the start.

The advent of online peer-to-peer crowdfunding presents a new type and source of finance for small firms. This raises the question of whether this innovation makes any difference to the type of business that can secure funding and the amount that they pay for this finance. In this paper, we examine the American online peer-to-peer loan crowdfunding website www.prosper.com to answer these questions. We create and analyse a dataset of 14,537 small firm unsecured loan applications. We find that lenders in this market ignore business characteristics and focus on personal characteristics instead, particularly a person’s credit score but also whether they are employed and provide a picture. This implies that entrepreneurs who want to raise finance in this market will need to use a very different pitch than the norm in the offline market—as personal rather than firm characteristics are the main determinants of securing funding and the price paid for it.