International Corruption and its Impacts Across Entrepreneurship Types

Using a large cross-country sample, this paper examines the impact of corruption on entrepreneurial activities by uniquely addressing two questions: (a) Does the impact of corruption on entrepreneurship vary across entrepreneurship type? (b) How does the effect of corruption differ across nations with varying prevalence of entrepreneurship? Considering three dimensions of entrepreneurship, nascent entrepreneurship, new business owners, and established new business owners, results, accounting for possible two-way causality, show that entrepreneurship is negatively affected by corruption across entrepreneurship types, with differences in the relative magnitudes of effects. This sanding effect of corruption, however, varies across the prevalence of corruption and switches to greasing for nascent entrepreneurs