Formal Institutions and Opportunity Entrepreneurship. The Contingent Role of Informal Institutions

This paper analyzes opportunity entrepreneurship through the interplay between formal and informal institutions. It seems evident that not all entrepreneurial initiatives have the same quality, thus the goal of a society should be to encourage the activities that best contribute to innovation and value generation. We theorize that informal institutions are contingent to the formal institutional environment where the new ventures operate. Our empirical results, using GEM data, confirm that, in countries with a more individualistic orientation, the relationship between formal institutions and opportunity entrepreneurship is more intense, as happens in societies with lower levels of uncertainty avoidance.