Students' evolving entrepreneurial behavior in post-socialist and market-oriented economies

Abstract

This paper theorizes how diverse institutional conditions influence students’ entrepreneurial behavior. We tested our hypotheses on a sample of 91,105 students from 557 universities located in nine postsocialist economies and nine market-oriented economies in Europe. The results show interesting trends in the influence of institutional conditions on students’ entrepreneurial behavior at the country and university levels. More concretely, national culture and university environment are found to be crucial for students becoming “nascent entrepreneurs” in post-socialist countries. Several implications for policy markers emerge from this study