An institutional perspective on borrowing discouragement among female-owned enterprises and the role of regional female empowerment

We develop an institutional perspective to examine the important, albeit largely overlooked, occurrence of borrowing discouragement for female-owned enterprises: the likelihood that they will not seek business financing because they believe their requests will be rejected. Given a prevailing business logic casting the field of entrepreneurship as largely male-typed, we theorize that female-owned enterprises will be more likely than their …