THE JDE CONTINUES TO SERVE THE PROFESSION

Abstract

As the JDE enters into its second decade of both electronic and print publishing, I am proud to present an excellent selection of articles included in the June, 2015 version of our journal. In the first article of the issue, Bridging The Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: An Empirical Analysis, Elvin Afandi and Majid Kermani explore the role of inequality in individual and country attributes between men and women in bridging the gender entrepreneurship gap. Using Oaxaca-type decomposition and its extensions, they analyze gender differences with respect to individual and country characteristics in explaining the entrepreneurship gender gap as well as return differentials. However, they leave the door open for the existence of gender discrimination. Samuel Dawa and Rebecca Namatovu examine the influence of social networks on the growth aspirations of female entrepreneurs. In their article, Social Networks and Growth of Female-Owned Ventures: A Sub-Saharan Perspective, the authors find a relationship between belonging to a social network and growth. However, they also point out that the challenges facing female entrepreneurs in this context negate the influence of social networks on growth. They also make the point that the metrics used to measure entrepreneurship related constructs are biased not only against women but even the developing country context. The next two articles pertain to China’s entrepreneurship movement. Birton Cowden, Jintong Tang, Jun Yang and Yuli Zhang use the Institution-Based View of Entrepreneurship to argue that the varying institutions within the subnational regions influence the innovativeness of new ventures. In Exploring Innovative New Ventures in China and the United States, the authors find that this variation in innovativeness of new ventures is more salient in the Chinese setting than the United States setting because of the unevenness of institutional transitions within Chinese subnational regions. Their results provide useful implications on the appropriateness of making comparisons at a country level. Social Networks, Cognition and Risk Recognition in New Ventures: Evidence from China applies cognitive information-processing theory and develops a theoretical framework that explores the interactive influences of entrepreneurs’ social networks and their Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship Vol. 20, No. 2 (2015) 1501002 (2 pages) © World Scientific Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S1084946715010025