The Returns to Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The topic of Entrepreneurial Finance involves many issues, including but not limited to the risks and returns to being an entrepreneur, financial contracting, business planning, capital gaps and the availability of capital, market booms and busts, public policy and international differences in entrepreneurial finance stemming from differences in laws, institutions and culture. As these issues are so extremely broad and complex, the academic and practitioner literature on topic usually focuses on at most one or two of these issues at one time. The Oxford Handbook of Entrepreneurial Finance provides a comprehensive picture of issues dealing with different sources of entrepreneurial finance and different issues with financing entrepreneurs. The Handbook comprises contributions from 48 authors based in 12 different countries. It is organized into seven parts, the first of which introduces the issues, explains the organization of the Handbook, and briefly summarizes the contributions made by the authors in each of the chapters. Part II covers the topics pertaining to financing new industries and the returns and risk to being an entrepreneur. Part III deals with entrepreneurial capital structure. Part IV discusses business planning, funding and funding gaps in entrepreneurial finance with a focus on credit markets. Part V provides analyses of the main alternative sources of entrepreneurial finance. Part VI considers issues in public policy towards entrepreneurial finance. Part VII considers international differences in entrepreneurial finance, including analyses of entrepreneurial finance in weak institutional environments as well as microfinance.