Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 25 February 2020

Abstract and Keywords

This article begins by surveying some macro-level evidence of the importance of banks for start-up activity. Then, because household financial decisions are intertwined with entrepreneurial financing decisions, the article provides a framework for delineating different types of entrepreneurial financing decisions. After this it considers evidence gleaned from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, a multiwave panel of nascent entrepreneurs and the businesses they start. Evidence from the Kauffman Firm Survey, a multiwave panel of firms that were started in 2004, follows. The remainder of the article considers additional sources of evidence and concludes with a discussion of the policy relevance of the importance of debt.

Keywords: capital structure, entrepreneurial firms, start-up activity, financial decisions, entrepreneurial financing decisions, nascent entrepreneurs

David Robinson

David Robinson is a professor of finance at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He is also a faculty research associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research's Productivity Program. He graduated from the London School of Economics with a master degree in economics, and earned MBA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. He has published numerous scholarly articles in top finance and economics journals. His research interests include empirical corporate finance, entrepreneurship, venture capital, and private equity.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.