Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses.

The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 15 contributions of the special issue on the "Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses," the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the effect on entrepreneurship and small businesses; a discussion of four literature strands based on this review; an overview of the contributions in this special issue; and some ideas for post-pandemic economic research.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems in cities: The role of institutions.

Entrepreneurship activity varies significantly across cities. We use the novel data for 1,652 ecosystem actors across sixteen cities in nine developing and transition economies during 2018-2019 to examine the role that institutional context plays in facilitating the productive entrepreneurship and reducing the unproductive entrepreneurship. This study is the first to develop and test a model of multi-dimensional institutional arrangements in cities. It demonstrates that not just that institutions matter in shaping the entrepreneurship ecosystem in cities, but in particular those institutional arrangements enhancing the productive and reducing unproductive entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest that differences between normative, cognitive, and regulatory pillars are associated with variance in both types of entrepreneurship in cities. For the formation of productive and high-growth entrepreneurs, all three pillars of institutional arrangement matter. For unproductive entrepreneurship normative pillar of institutions and the role of civil society matter most. This study has theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurship ecosystem policy in cities.