Executive forum: A study of informal investing in 29 nations composing the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor

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“…One was the case of family acting as the key provider of critical finance by mortgaging the family apartment. This case is in line with the literature [Bygrave et al, 2003], but then there was the case a family member acting as the biggest obstacle to the entrepreneur's start-up. One piece of research [Anderson et al, 2005] described the case of an entrepreneur who would not let his son work at his firm thinking that it would damage his son's development.…”

Seeding New Ventures - Green Thumbs and Fertile Fields: Individual and Environmental Drivers of Informal Investment

“…The term "love money" (Bygrave et al, 2003;Mason, 2006) describes individuals' financing of family members' ventures. Past research on the drivers of informal investment suggests that individual characteristics and personal context more strongly predict the decision to invest in non-family members' businesses than in family members' businesses (Maula et al, 2005).…”

“…The amount of informal investment funding provided is positively correlated with economic development as measured by the per capita GDP of a nation (Bygrave et al 2003), however the connection between informal investor prevalence rate and per capita GDP has not been examined. As populations in developed countries are most likely to have opportunity-oriented entrepreneurs , we expect a positive connection between the development of the country and the level of informal investment:…”

“…The GEM study is representative of the population and includes 4 billion of the estimated 6.3 billion world population. GEM data is useful for tracking informal investment behaviour (Bygrave et al, 2003;O'Gorman and Terjesen, 2005;Mason, 2006;Wong and Ho, 2007), but has not provided the fine-grained depth of other informal investor specific studies. GEM data is particularly useful.…”

“…Informal venture capital plays a key role in the 'firm size-age finance continuum' (Berger and Udell, 1998) and is the primary source of external equity finance for entrepreneurs' new ventures (Bygrave et al, 2003). Among new ventures in the United States, informal investment provides between two and five times more financing than formal venture capital (Van Osnabrugge, 2000) and is estimated at US$108 billion per annum (Bygrave and Reynolds, 2005).…”