What Is the Impact of Informal Entrepreneurship on Venture Capital Flows?

Abstract

There has been a diverse range of research on the factors enabling informal entrepreneurship as well as the means to avoid or to eradicate its incidence. Several researchers argued that venture capital and financial flows, in general, contribute to economic growth and development. There have also been observations of how the investor level of trust in institutions facilitates investment decisions. This trust comes into play at the level of informal entrepreneurship and the ability of governments to control this type of entrepreneurship. Given that a great deal of research on this subject focuses its analysis on developing countries, we have chosen to investigate the reality of European countries precisely because of the scarcity of studies on the effect of informal entrepreneurship in this context. Our research aims to assess how informal entrepreneurship effects on venture capital flows. We use aggregated data at country level collected from a variety of sources, including the World Bank, Organization for Cooperation and Development and World Economic Forum, between 2006 and 2015 and 23 countries in Europe, corresponding to 230 observations (panel no. balanced). Through econometric estimation, which took place according to methodologies based on multiple regression models for panel data, the results demonstrate how informal entrepreneurship has a negative moderating effect between GDP and venture cUKapital flows. We intend to contribute to a better understanding of the effect of informal entrepreneurship on the flows of venture capital.