Small Business Economics最新文献

{"title":"Does rent-seeking entrepreneurship hurt the environment? Historical insights from the US meatpacking industry","authors":"Pierre Desrochers, Andrew Smith","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01241-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01241-4","url":null,"abstract":"This paper uses a historical case study of the American meatpacking industry to examine how rent-seeking entrepreneurship can harm environmental outcomes. We first show that Chicago’s largest meatpackers simultaneously reduced pollution and their production costs through innovative by-product utilization. We then demonstrate how these successes provoked rent-seeking behavior from less efficient competitors who pressured policymakers into dismantling the system of industrial organization created by the Chicago meatpackers. Our analysis reveals that rent-seeking behavior can obstruct market-based innovations that promote sustainability. We outline a novel causal model in which rent-seeking actively undermines the capacity of private-sector initiatives to improve environmental outcomes. Our findings challenge some of the dominant assumptions in the environmental policy, management studies, and circular economy literatures. We suggest that profit-seeking entrepreneurship in a regime of competitive and lightly regulated markets may, at least in some circumstances, deliver superior environmental results compared to management by elected officials.","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148409046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The political economy of entrepreneurship","authors":"Daniel L. Bennett, Christopher J. Boudreaux, Stephen Gohmann, Maria Minniti","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01239-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01239-y","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148409016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Can Digital Innovation Hubs improve the performance of SMEs? Empirical evidence from Italy","authors":"Diego Matricano, Eric W. Liguori","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01228-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01228-1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148285789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Taking stock and looking ahead: research on antecedents and impact of sustainable entrepreneurship","authors":"Jacob Hörisch, Iñaki Peña-Legazkue, Roy Thurik","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01219-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01219-2","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces the special issue “Antecedents and Impact of Sustainable Entrepreneurship: An International Perspective.” It reviews previous special issues in the field and situates the present volume within this evolving body of scholarship. Common thematic and methodological patterns are identified alongside persistent shortcomings. The article concludes with a research agenda that highlights several critical gaps, including the limited number of rigorous studies assessing the actual impact of sustainable entrepreneurship, insufficient research on scaling and diffusion processes, and the need for replication studies to mitigate potential biases stemming from single-context empirical designs.","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148285790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visual artificial intelligence as a methodological frontier in entrepreneurship research: a roadmap and empirical demonstration","authors":"Martin Obschonka, Christian Fisch, Tatiana Beliaeva, Sami Ben Jabeur, Tharindu Fernando, Clinton Fookes","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01221-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01221-8","url":null,"abstract":"Visual artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to enter entrepreneurship research but adoption remains scarce, even as recent advances in vision-language models and AI-assisted coding are substantially lowering the technical barriers to entry. Combined with the abundance of visual data now available, visual AI opens new opportunities to study questions previously out of reach, while also raising methodological and ethical challenges. This paper provides a structured roadmap for using visual AI in entrepreneurship research: We map visual data sources, outline visual AI approaches, identify research insights, and propose an ethics audit. Ultimately, we illustrate the application of this visual AI pipeline with an example study: a facial image classification model distinguished between entrepreneur and non-entrepreneur portrait images in a platform-specific dataset with 79.5% accuracy, far outperforming human experts, raising important methodological and ethical questions. Plain English Summary Entrepreneurial life is inherently visual, from pitch decks and startup logos to founder emotions in fundraising presentations, workspaces, product designs, and satellite maps of innovation hubs, yet this rich visual panorama has been largely ignored by researchers. This paper provides a step-by-step guide for using visual AI in entrepreneurship research: how to find and select visual data, which AI methods fit which research questions, and how to build in ethical safeguards from the start. Such research comes with real ethical challenges around privacy, consent, algorithmic bias, and the risk of reinforcing existing biases and stereotypes, all of which the paper addresses throughout. To show what this looks like in practice, we include an example study in which an AI model classified professional portrait images as belonging to entrepreneurs or non-entrepreneurs with 79.5% accuracy, far outperforming human experts. This result may reflect differences in professional self-presentation and platform-specific conventions that are imperceptible to the human eye, but it also illustrates how easily such findings can be misinterpreted or taken out of context in ways that raise serious ethical concerns. The key implication for researchers is that visual AI can open genuinely new empirical territory, but responsible use demands that ethical considerations are treated as part of the method, not an afterthought.","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148285794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evolving ventures and venture capital syndicate resource diversity","authors":"Yu Luna Liu, Haemin Dennis Park","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01223-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01223-6","url":null,"abstract":"We examine how lead venture capital (VC) investors adjust VC syndicate resource diversity to meet ventures’ evolving developmental needs. As ventures transition from early to later stages, lead VCs tend to assemble more resource-diverse syndicates to support expanding resource requirements. However, greater diversity also increases coordination costs of managing the syndicate. We argue that lead VCs balance these competing considerations, such that syndicate composition depends on attributes of both the lead VC and the syndicate that shape this trade-off. We test our conjectures using a sample of US ventures receiving VC funding between 1990 and 2019. Our findings offer an evolutionary perspective on VC syndicate composition across venture life stages.","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148285797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mentoring, intersectionality and awareness of SME finance initiatives","authors":"Samuel Mwaura, Stephen Knox, Sara Carter","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01224-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01224-5","url":null,"abstract":"Despite a history of low uptake, particularly among women and ethnic minorities, public and private finance initiatives can be invaluable for entrepreneurs. This study examines the relationship between mentoring and awareness of SME finance initiatives, with a particular focus on the gender and ethnicity of mentee entrepreneurs. Analysing the UK SME Finance Monitor data, we find that mentors are positively associated with awareness, more so for private-sector finance initiatives and among minority women. Drawing on Relational Cultural Theory, we find that mentoring may abate awareness gaps among minority entrepreneurs but may also reinforce native White advantage. However, suggesting novel intersectional mentoring benefits, awareness rates for mentored minority women are similar to those of mentored native White women. In contrast, we find evidence of under-performance of both mentored and unmentored minority males in their awareness of finance initiatives. Our conclusions suggest mentoring helps reduce disadvantage for some entrepreneurs but also contributes to processes that produce, reduce and reproduce disadvantage along gender and ethnic lines.","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"245 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148285799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Entrepreneurs and sleep: a scoping review of barriers, recovery strategies, and effects on performance","authors":"Xavier Michaud, Florence Guiliani, Félix Ballesteros Leiva, Guido Simonelli","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01220-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01220-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148285800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Entrepreneurship ecosystems and national climate change performance: a global multi-method analysis","authors":"Mehmet Ali Köseoglu, Nagihan Cakmakoglu Arici","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01225-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01225-4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148285801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Juggling attention spaces: impact of regulatory focus dispersion on firm performance in family and non-family businesses","authors":"Pankaj C. Patel, Alfredo De Massis","doi":"10.1007/s11187-026-01217-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-026-01217-4","url":null,"abstract":"This study employs the attention-based view (ABV) to examine the impact of regulatory focus dispersion on family and non-family firms. Guided by the socioemotional wealth framework, family firms face challenges as diverse regulations threaten family firm performance. Family firms (non-family firms) realize negative (positive) performance with increasing regulatory focus dispersion. This research contributes by integrating ABV with family firm characteristics and regulatory focus dispersion, offering implications for increasingly regulatory environments.","PeriodicalId":21803,"journal":{"name":"Small Business Economics","volume":"146 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148285803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}