Regulation and entrepreneurship : an antagonism to demystify ?

This dissertation consists of five essays. The first essay offers a critical deconstruction of the literature devoted to the impact of regulation on entrepreneurship. Our deconstruction highlights the predominance of an economic approach focused on the assessment of the “constraining” dimensions of regulations, as well as the emergence of a challenging approach that looks at the way entrepreneurs adapt their behaviors to new regulations. Using this second approach, we next try to understand why some entrepreneurs positively use regulation as a source of business opportunity and how do they succeed in this. The purpose of the second essay of this dissertation is to conceptually answer that question by developing research propositions, while both the third and fourth essays aim at answering it empirically. In the third essay, we make a multiple cases study of entrepreneurs investigating the positive use of different regulations, while the fourth essay is based upon interviews with 14 nascent entrepreneurs about one specific regulation, i.e. the Support Structures for Self-employment Creation Act. The fifth essay examines how regulations should be constructed to facilitate entrepreneurship. It is a normative essay designed to provide Belgian lawmakers with useful recommendations.(IAG 3) -- UCL, 201