IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/35780.html

Regulating Entrepreneurship: The Case of Capital Requirements

Author

Listed:
  • Annika Bacher
  • Andreas Fagereng
  • Marius A. K. Ring
  • Ella Getz Wold

Abstract

Governments have long imposed minimum equity requirements on new corporations. Opponents view them as barriers to entry while proponents argue that they protect stakeholders from financially unviable businesses. We study this quantity-quality trade-off using a Norwegian reform and comprehensive data linking entrepreneurs to their firms. A 70% reduction in required capital nearly doubled entrepreneurial entry, with no deterioration in survival, profitability, productivity, or interest-bearing leverage and no differences in founders’ ex-ante income, liquidity, or ability. These results suggest capital requirements restrict entrepreneurship without screening on quality or liquidity. Rather, we highlight returns-to-scale heterogeneity as an important determinant of the observed entry response.

Suggested Citation

  • Annika Bacher & Andreas Fagereng & Marius A. K. Ring & Ella Getz Wold, 2026. "Regulating Entrepreneurship: The Case of Capital Requirements," NBER Working Papers 35780, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35780
    Note: CF PE PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w35780.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G38 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • G50 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - General
    • H10 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - General
    • H32 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Firm
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35780. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.