Abstract
Entrepreneurship is shaped by
institutions. However, past research has largely assumed that everyone has
equal property rights even though women often operate under a different
property rights structure and have fewer legal rights than men. We fill a gap
in the literature by examining how the property rights of women impacts female entrepreneurship
in a panel countries using data on property rights from the Economic Freedom
of the World dataset and data on entrepreneurship from the Global
Entrepreneurship Monitor. We find that better protection of property rights
for women is associated with more the female entrepreneurship relative to male
entrepreneurship.