> 12A recent article by Frankish et al. (2013) questions the idea that previous work experience affects firms’ performances. They propose that there are good reasons to expect no significant effects of work experience, such as the importance of chance, entrepreneurs’ propensity toward optimism, and the unlikely event that two business situations are identical. They use UK data to show that there is no significant evidence about entrepreneurial learning. It must be noted, however, that such results could, to some extent, be due to the peculiarity of the sample they use due to institutional specificities of the UK business environment.

13The risk of overstating the hindering role of credit constraints is particularly high in questionnaire analyses where nascent or newborn entrepreneurs are asked to list their main difficulties in starting and/or running a new firm. In fact, they have the self-indulgent tendency to indicate a lack of external financial support as the main cause of their problems, whereas in most cases, this is only a symptom of more fundamental deficiencies that are internal to the firm.

14The authors extracted their firm-level data from the World Bank Investment Climate Survey.

15Nafziger and Terrell (1996), using evidence from India, found that higher education of the founding entrepreneur reduces firm survival, indicating the importance of outside opportunities in paid wage employment within the formal sector.

16Ligthelm (2011) found that business management skills are one of the strongest predictors of survival among small informal firms in South Africa.

17For an updated survey on the vast available micro-evidence on the link between innovation and productivity, see Mohnen and Hall (2013). For a discussion of the key role of innovation and R&D in young firms and SMEs in general, see Ortega-Argilés, Vivarelli, and Voigt (2009) and Voigt and Moncada-Paternò-Castello (2012). 18 For instance, Arrighetti and Vivarelli (1999), after applying a factor analysis to a sample of 147 Italian spinoffs, found that innovative factors (related both to the innovative motivations of the founder and to his/her previous innovative experience in the mother firm) were significantly correlated with post-entry performance. Their subsequent cluster analysis also revealed that the innovative group was more likely to have better postentry performance (see also Vivarelli and Audretsch 1998).

19Rather, R&D-based initiatives in DCs are often the outcome of the outsourcing by US, European, and Japanese multinationals; see Moncada-Paternò-Castello, Vivarelli, and Voigt 2011.

20This is unfortunate because, as discussed above, “defensive and necessity entrepreneurs” appear to make up the bulk of self-employment in DCs, with activities ranging from street vending and small retailing to traditional personal services.

21 This mechanism can work up to a given threshold. Belonging to a socioeconomically excluded group may decrease the likelihood of successfully founding a new firm (this is the case, for instance, for the caste system in India; see Monsen, Mahagaonkar, and Dienes 2012).

22As correctly noted by Shane (2009, 41), “Policy makers believe a dangerous myth. They think that start-up companies are a magic bullet that will transform depressed economic regions, generate innovation, create jobs. This belief is flawed because the typical start-up is not innovative, creates few jobs, and generates little wealth”.

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