"As low-income countries industrialize, workers choose between informal self-employment and low-skill manufacturing. What do workers trade off, and what are the long run impacts of this occupational choice? Self-employment is thought to be volatile and risky, but to provide autonomy and flexibility. Industrial firms are criticized for poor wages and working conditions, but they could offer steady hours among other advantages. We worked with five Ethiopian industrial firms to randomize entry-level applicants to one of three treatment arms: an industrial job offer; a control group; or an "entrepreneurship" program of $300 plus business training. We followed the sample over a year. Industrial jobs offered more hours than the control group's informal opportunities, but had little impact on incomes due to lower wages. Most applicants quit the sector quickly, finding industrial jobs unpleasant and risky. Indeed, serious health problems rose one percentage point for every month of industrial work. Applicants seem to understand the risks, but took the industrial work temporarily while searching for better work. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurship program stimulated self-employment, raised earnings by 33%, provided steady work hours, and halved the likelihood of taking an industrial job in future. Overall, when the barriers to self-employment were relieved, applicants appear to have preferred entrepreneurial to industrial labor."

"Entrepreneurship is becoming an important source of economic activity and each time more sophisticated institutional arrangements (ecosystems) are populating more developed markets, as chances to grow fast and big in specific niches of those markets attract all necessary stakeholders for these ecosystems to work (entrepreneurs, investors, universities tech transfer offices, business accelerators, corporate and public procurers, etc.). In front of this, in less developed markets, some innovation agencies have been piloting opportunity driven startup programs, trying to cope with some of the barriers that these markets face so as to identify, select and give to potentially highly productive startups a real chance to succeed. This paper presents the results of an impact evaluation of one of those programs: Startup Peru."

"Organizational sponsorship mediates the relationship between new organizations and their environments by creating a resource-munificent context intended to increase survival rates among those new organizations. Existing theories are prone to treat such resource munificence as the inverse of resource dependence, indicating that the application of new resources in an entrepreneurial context should always benefit new firms. These existing theories, however, often overlook heterogeneity in both types of applied resources as well as founding environmental conditions. By attending to these nuances, we reveal that resource munificence is not necessarily predictive of organizational survival. We find that resource munificence related to sponsorship can potentially decrease or increase survival rates among new organizations and that these effects are contingent on fit of resource type with its respective geographic-based founding density. These findings confirm the need for a more-nuanced theory of sponsorship that attends to the mechanisms and conditions by which resource munificence is likely to alter new organization survival rates."

"With more than a quarter of the Philippines' 100 million-strong population living below the poverty line, efforts to tackle poverty and improve living, working and health conditions must be stepped up if the populous Southeast Asian nation is to achieve its Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) commitments by 2030.

This publication aims to demonstrate how Inclusive Business can be engaged in the Philippines to contribute to achieving national development priorities and the SDGs -and how governments and other stakeholders can create an environment in which such business models thrive and reach scale."

"In search for new models to provide risk capital, mezzanine finance blends elements from traditional Private Equity (PE) and debt financing into a unique product. Its an additional offering in the SME finance ecosystem for missing middle entrepreneurs.

As a relatively young and rather complex segment in the impact investing space, this commissioned study provides an understanding of the specificities, diversity (and complexities) of Mezzanine Financing, critical to spurring innovative thinking on both the fund manager- and investor-sides, so products may be improved and models may be more scalable.

This study is the first of its kind and represents a first step into building small cap SME mezzanine finance as an asset class on its own."

"The landscape for entrepreneurial finance has changed strongly over the last years. Many new players have entered the arena. This editorial introduces and describes the new players and compares them along the four dimensions: debt or equity, investment goal, investment approach, and investment target. Following this, we discuss the factors explaining the emergence of the new players and group them into supply- and demand-side factors. The editorial gives researchers and practitioners orientation about recent developments in entrepreneurial finance and provides avenues for relevant and fruitful further research."

"Our main motivation in writing this guide has been our hope of unlocking IB partnerships' immense potential for helping to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) more effectively. To this end, our guide aims to give NGOs and companies guidance in conducting more productive IB partnerships as equal partners.

This guide is primarily aimed at internationally operating NGOs (INGOs). Our secondary audience includes companies of all sizes."

"This dissertation explores the learning of social entrepreneurs in accelerators. Building on Jarvis' (2010) existential theory of learning, it conceptualises entrepreneurial learning as a process in which purposeful individuals encounter and transform experiences of disjuncture. These experiences are embedded in both human and material contexts. Learning processes and outcomes are portrayed as phenomena that are influenced by social entrepreneurs' interaction with these environments. Accelerators are depicted as non-formal contexts of learning, of relatively short duration - in which the structure and content of education is progressively adapted to the requirements of the individual."

"No More Excuses: Responsible Supply Chains in a Globalised World is both timely and extremely interesting. It is a report card on the engagement and commitment of multinational companies (and others in global supply chains) in the mega-challenge of aligning corporate goals and incentives with important economic, social and ethical standards and objectives. It is an honest and objective look, based on a vast amount of survey information across eight economies (China, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and the US), each of which has a key role in global supply chains. It is designed to get at the perceptions of corporate leaders, their commitments and achievements to date. And it paints a clear picture of important areas where progress is lagging, or in a few cases, in reversal."

"While business accelerators remain understudied in the academic literature, there is growing interest in understanding how accelerators work and where they provide value to entrepreneurs. In this paper, we focus exactly on this question – we examine how mentorship and investor ties, two key aspects observed across accelerators in general lead to positive accelerator outcomes and through them, to longterm firm success outcomes for the start-ups participating in accelerators. Using the full cohort (n=105) of an international accelerator, we follow the progress of the startups during the accelerated period and continue to follow these startups for 15 months. We find that startups that participate more in mentorship events have higher likelihood of achieving short-term outcomes during the accelerator, such as the release of a prototype and generating revenue for the first time. Similarly, startups that develop more investor ties during the accelerator survive and raise capital at a higher rate. Finally, we find evidence that certain short-term accelerator outcomes also increase the chances of survival and investment. On the basis of these results, we provide practical implications for start-ups as well as managers of accelerator programs, in addition to theoretical contributions to entrepreneurship research."