Advances in Entrepreneurial Finance

Advances in Entrepreneurial Finance brings together contributions from researchers from the fields of entrepreneurship, behavioral finance, psychology, and neuroscience to shed new light on the dynamics of decision making and risk taking by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (VCs). Every new venture requires access to capital at competitive interest rates, and much has been written on general entrepreneurship by management scholars and financial contracting by financial economists using traditional finance theory with all its highly restrictive assumptions regarding decision makers' cognitive capabilities and behavior. But recent developments in behavioral finance can now be applied to understand how entrepreneurs and VCs perceive risk and uncertainty and how they decide and act accordingly. Showcasing the latest research, this volume demonstrates that findings from the behavioral and neuroscience arenas can and do explain decision making by entrepreneurs and venture investors in the real world. Consequently, such findings have practical implications not only for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and their advisors, but also all government agencies and NGOs that want to support product and technological innovation, capital formation, job creation, and economic development.

Rassoual Yazdipour is Professor of Finance at California State University-Fresno, Craig School of Business, Department of Finance and Business Law. He is a founding member of the CSU Teaching Business Faculty Council, a system-wide faculty group with much interest in using technology in education. A veteran online educator and researcher, he co-founded and chaired the First Annual CSU Business Conference on Online Teaching and Learning in 2008. He also serves as President and CEO of the Academy of Entrepreneurial Finance, which offers a dedicated forum for exchange of research ideas related to the ever-growing field of entrepreneurial and small business finance, and on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance. He has published articles in such journals as Small Business Economics (Springer) and Strategic Change (Wiley) and edited the book, Advances in Small Business Finance (Kluwer, 1991). He holds a Ph.D. from Ohio State University.