There is no gender difference between success in establishing a business once both males and females have the same preference to self-employment and attempts towards establishing a new business. However, the gender gap tends to be huge when it comes to individual preferences and attempts to start up an entrepreneurial activity. In this study, we empirically estimate the role of inequality in individual and country attributes between man and woman in the bridging the gender entrepreneurship gap. Using Oaxaca-type decomposition and its extensions, we found that differences in both individual as well as country characteristics largely favor males, while the former play greater role in explaining the gender gap. Empirical results also show differences in return to measured characteristics favor males. Nevertheless, a portion of gender gap that is unexplained by the differences in these characteristics and their coefficients (or return) could still indicate gender discrimination.
This paper empirically tests several hypotheses about the nexus of corruption-institutional trust in Post-Soviet transitional countries of the former Soviet Union and Mongolia. We use two different indices of institutional trust to check the robustness of our analysis and estimate OLS and instrumental variable models with and without interaction terms. All things considered, our findings reject "greases the wheels" and "trust begets an honest political system" hypotheses. Instead, our findings support the "sand the wheels" hypothesis. Furthermore, a multiplicative interaction model suggests that the negative marginal effects of experienced corruption are higher in the environments where satisfaction with services is low. In addition, we found that increases in corruption erode trust at all levels of the societal institutions including political parties, government and financial institutions, international investors, non-profit organizations, and trade unions. This finding is important since it highlights the negative consequences of corruption on the development of broader level economic institutions and on civil society.