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This study addresses three questions pertinent to emergent work at the corruption and innovation nexus: whether, why and how involvement in bribery influences firm innovation in emerging economies. We address these queries by building upon and extending the institutional theory with the economics of corruption literature. We use multi-level data on 15,404 firms from 36 emerging economies to test our hypotheses. Our findings indicate that the relationship between innovation and corruption is curvilinear, i.e., firm innovation increases up to a tipping point and decreases with an increasing involvement in corruption after that. Bureaucratic red tape moderates the link between corruption and firm innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We advance a theory delineating the consequences of the entrepreneur's skill diversity for the firm's likelihood of high growth. We suggest that firms headed by jack-of-all-trades entrepreneurs are more likely to exhibit high growth, and this relationship is partially mediated by the firm-level innovation. Multilevel mediation analyses of 357 German start-ups lend overall support, showing that skill diversity has both a direct and an indirect effect on high growth through the firm's "depth of innovation", i.e., the frequency and degree of novelty of its new offerings. Industry dynamism acts as a catalyst for entrepreneurs possessing most diverse competencies and skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose four papers that collectively contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of gender inequalities in entrepreneurship: they draw on different theoretical perspectives and conduct analyses at different levels of units: the first two papers will focus on macro-level conditions at country level, comparing how institutional and structural conditions across countries affect men's and women's representations in entrepreneurship by, for example, offering different types of incentives to men and women to start businesses. The last two papers investigate gender inequalities in different forms of entrepreneurship by differentiating self-employment from founding new organizations and theorizing the various mechanisms that drive women's entry into different segments of entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]