Failure or voluntary exit? Reassessing the female underperformance hypothesis

Business Failure and Entrepreneurship: Emergence, Evolution and Future Research

“…Such assumptions are unreasonable for numerous reasons (as discussed in Section 2.1), firms disappear due to owners retiring, selling their firm or changing to a different venture [Watson and Everett, 1996]. Discontinuance does not equate to failure given the many positive factors that lead to firm closure [Justo et al, 2015, Wennberg and DeTienne, 2014, Khelil, 2016, Walsh and Cunningham, 2015. Furthermore, persistently underperforming firms are excluded from this definition even though they may consume more resources than they create [Khelil, 2016].…”

“…However, discontinuance of ownership includes firms that are sold due to the owner wanting to retire, firms sold for a profit, and firms sold simply because the owner wants to move on to another venture [Watson and Everett, 1996]. Assuming discontinuance is a synonym for failure is myopic and unreasonable [Khelil, 2016;Wennberg and DeTienne, 2014;Justo et al, 2015] Furthermore, it is the inclusion of these entities that skew and inflate the failure statistics. Additional difficulties arise from the fact that there are multiple variations of discontinuance, some classify discontinuance of ownership whilst others use discontinuance of the business [Watson and Everett, 1996].…”

“…Whilst studies based in the US continue to dominate the literature the past decade has somewhat alleviated this issue. Entrepreneurial failure studies based on data outside of the US have been appearing in the Journal of Business Venturing in recent years; these include research from the UK [Ucbasaran et al, 2010, Cope, 2011, Tunisia [Khelil, 2016], Spain [Justo et al, 2015], Sweden [Jenkins et al, 2014, Wennberg et al, 2010, New Zealand [Singh et al, 2015] and Northern Europe [Mantere et al, 2013]. The growing prevalence of studies from other countries is a positive indication however the US context remains the most common setting for the majority of failure studies.…”

After the harvest: A stewardship perspective on entrepreneurship and philanthropy

“…However, with only a few exceptions (e.g., Bahrami and Evans, 1995;Mason and Harrison, 2006), scholars have largely focused on the actions occurring before exit or harvest, such as the motivations (Justo et al, 2015), routes (Dehlen et al, 2014), and strategies to achieve exit. Our research explores new ground by exploring what happens after harvest.…”

The influence of entrepreneurs’ social referents on start-up size

“…We also control for fear of failure, a variable measuring whether fear would discourage an entrepreneur from starting up a business, as this variable can be an important constraint for entrepreneurial activity (Vaillant and Lafuente 2007). Another relevant control variable, particularly in the Spanish context, is necessity entrepreneurship, which takes the value 1 if the business was created by necessity or 0 if it was motivated by opportunity (Justo et al 2015). Regarding the human capital variables, we capture higher education via a dummy variable set equal to 1 if the entrepreneur has post-secondary (university degree) education and 0 otherwise.…”