The Consequences of Short-Term Institutional Change in the Rule of Law for Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Research Summary: Past research views institutions as stable and slow to change and uses institutional differences to explain cross-national variation in entrepreneurship. This article introduces a new perspective to institutional theory, that of short-term institutional change. Integrating insights from cognitive science allows us to theorize not just about the significance of short-term institutional change but also about why and how deterioration versus improvements in institutions have distinct effects. We test how short-term institutional change impacts entrepreneurship in a cross-country multilevel study. We find that short-term change in the rule of law affects entrepreneurial entry and that institutional deterioration weighs heavier than institutional improvement. We argue and find that changes in the rule of law are more consequential for entrepreneurship compared to changes in business regulations. Managerial Summary: It is known that the quality of institutions affects individuals' decisions to pursue entrepreneurship. Yet, we newly investigate effects of year-to-year changes in national institutions. Not only changes in business regulations matter, but also changes in more fundamental institutional aspects, especially in the rule of law. We find that institutional change has an impact because, on its basis, potential entrepreneurs form expectations about the future and therefore about the riskiness of their investment. Deteriorations compared to improvements in the rule of law are more consequential for entrepreneurship, consistent with the fact that losses loom larger than gains in human decisions.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/gsj.1413
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Economics, Finance & Entrepreneurship
College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing
College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School
Additional Information: © 2021 The Authors. Global Strategy Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Strategic Management Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor,entrepreneurship,executive constraints,institutional change,prospect theory,rule of law,Business and International Management,Strategy and Management
Publication ISSN: 2042-5805
Last Modified: 04 Oct 2024 07:31
Date Deposited: 28 Jun 2021 07:42
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://onlinel ... 0.1002/gsj.1413 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2021-11
Published Online Date: 2021-06-23
Accepted Date: 2021-06-05
Authors: Mickiewicz, Tomasz (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-5261-5662)
Stephan, Ute (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-4514-6057)
Shami, Muntasir (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-6306-5552)

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