Title: Foreign aid, entry barrier, and women entrepreneurship: Evidence from Africa

时间：2024年10月11日（周五）10:00-11:30

地点：承泽园329会议室

Speaker: Jane Lu（City University of Hong Kong）

Abstract:

Women are under-represented in entrepreneurship. Extant research frequently attributes the relatively higher entry barrier to being the main impeding factor for women entrepreneurship and proposes country-level or intra-country-level policies to help female entrepreneurs. However, research to date has ignored the role of supra-national institutions. Considering that gender equality is an aspect of global societal grand challenges that need to be tackled through transnational solutions, we hypothesize that women-targeted foreign aid benefits female entrepreneurs by reducing entry barriers for women. Women-targeted foreign aid projects can provide entrepreneurial resources, facilitate policy reform, and diffuse social norms on gender equality, all of which reduce the cost of women starting a business. The lowered cost of women starting a business can enhance women entrepreneurship. Results based on 18,551 firm-year observations in 34 African countries show that women-targeted foreign aid projects are positively related to women entrepreneurship, and the cost of women starting a business fully mediates the relationship. Our findings enrich research on women entrepreneurship and supra-national institutions. It also has implications for policymakers regarding how to address grand societal challenges.

Introduction of Speaker

Jane Lu is a Chair Professor at the Department of Management, College of Business, City University of Hong Kong. She received her MBA from China Europe International Business School and Ph.D. from the Ivey School of Business, Western University. Before joining academia, she worked as an export manager in a large Chinese trading company and as the head of the corporate finance department of a Dutch bank in Shanghai. Her management experience has significantly shaped her research interests. Jane’s research centers on the intersection of organization theory and strategy with a focus on international strategy and non-market strategy. Her recent research focuses on emerging market firms and their non-market strategies. Her work has appeared in leading journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management, and Journal of International Business Studies. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management (2016-2018). She is currently a Senior Editor of the Journal of World Business and a Consulting Editor of the Journal of International Business Studies. She is an elected fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB) and AIB Vice President (Administration).