#GirlPower: Women's Political Empowerment and Female Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This study investigates how political empowerment of women leads to more women entrepreneurs. Drawing on psychology and sociology, this study identifies the nuanced relationship between political empowerment of women and female entrepreneurship through exploring two important moderators: perceived capabilities and labor force participation of women. In so doing, this article deepens our understanding of factors relevant to female entrepreneurship. Using a reliable measure of female political empowerment and a country level panel data, we find that female political empowerment is positively associated with female entrepreneurship. Our results also suggest that female labor force participation rate curvilinearly moderate this relationship. We also leverage a novel semi-parametric method to paint a nuanced picture of the relationship between politics, gender and entrepreneurship.