Previous studies have been silent on how institutional factors influence scientists’ entrepreneurial cognitions and behavior. Transition economies offer a unique opportunity for addressing this issue since different generations of scientists experienced vastly different ideology and management systems. Built on the entrepreneurial cognitions and contextualization views and interview data from scientists in Vietnam, this study found that scientists internalized institutional factors to form their motivations, partnership approaches, and behavioral competencies, which in turn influence their chosen modes of entrepreneurship. This suggests that new institutions which address younger generations and focus on developing entrepreneurial qualities are pertinent to promote commercialization in transition economies.

This study provides a fresh look at the SME sector's economic backbone visà-vis credit constraint dichotomy in Vietnam-Asia's rising economic star. The study uses data from the Survey of Manufacturing SMEs in Vietnam from 2005 to 2013 and adopts a two-step Heckman modelling strategy to single out firms with formal financing needs that are credit constrained. Results show that several characteristics-including firm size, investment, financial assets, leverage, equity, registration, gender of owner, age, and education-significantly affect the likelihood of either credit constraints or demand. The main results do not change even when the issue of endogeneity is dealt with. Particularly, we provide evidence that unobserved factors that increase the probability of debt demand also increase the probability of being constrained. Policy implications are discussed.

Studies of scientist entrepreneurship have recognized a diverse range of proself motivations but have largely ignored the role of prosocial motivation. As technology inventions often bring in high positive externality, we argue that prosocial motivation is important for scientist entrepreneurship and sustainable development. Drawing from motivated information processing theory we develop a model linking proself and prosocial motivation with scientist entrepreneurship. The hypotheses were tested based on survey data from a sample of Vietnamese scientists. The results show that both proself and prosocial motivation are positively associated with scientist entrepreneurship. However, the positive association between prosocial motivation and scientist entrepreneurship is lessened by proself motivation. This study calls for more attention to prosocial motivation in theory and policy development on scientist entrepreneurship.

Preferential loans play an important role in the process of reducing poverty in developing countries. Considering the data set from the 2010 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey, we aim to examine the influential factors in probability of households getting access to preferential loans. Additionally, we analyze the determinants of household income in association with the loans by applying a quintile regression model. Our results show that ethnicity-related factors have the largest marginal effect on the access to preferential loans. The results from the quantile regression model demonstrate that, at the lower quantiles of household income, the debt factor has deeper impact on the borrowing group.