Institutions and student entrepreneurship: the effects of economic conditions, culture and education

Despite the significant function of institutions in determining the prevalence of national entrepreneurship, their effects towards student entrepreneurship remains unexplored and critically overlooked since policies to increase national entrepreneurship through the empowerment of education system have already been established in most countries. Based on the integration of both institutional theory and eclectic theory of entrepreneurship, this study examined macro-level factors of nascent student entrepreneurship. GDP growth, unemployment, entrepreneurial culture and entrepreneurship education at basic and high levels were examined using multiple sources of data in 2014 and 2016, which involved 75 samples from 49 countries. In the context of university student, the results exhibited the dominance of both cultural and educational factors as opposed to macroeconomic indicators. Conclusively, this study extended the existing knowledge base on entrepreneurship through the development of an empirically supported model, which displayed how student entrepreneurship could be influenced by both formal and informal institutional forces.