Women's property rights equality and entrepreneurial activity

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is shaped by institutions. However, past research has largely assumed that everyone has equal property rights even though women often operate under a different property rights structure and have fewer legal rights than men. We fill a gap in the literature by examining how the property rights of women impacts female entrepreneurship in a panel countries using data on property rights from the Economic Freedom of the World dataset and data on entrepreneurship from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. We find that better protection of property rights for women is associated with more the female entrepreneurship relative to male entrepreneurship.