seminar for comments and criticism. The three anonymous referees and our editor, Simon Parker, gave us thorough and valuable comments, yet all remaining errors are our own. The authors' names are listed in alphabetical order for convenience. This was a fully collaborative effort.

In this paper we use a comparative perspective to explore the ways in which institutions and networks have influenced entrepreneurial development in Russia. We utilize Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data to study the effects of the weak institutional environment in Russia on entrepreneurship, comparing it first with all available GEM country samples and second, in more detail, with Brazil and Poland. Our results suggest that Russia's institutional environment is important in explaining its relatively low levels of entrepreneurship development, where the latter is measured in terms of both number of startups and of existing business owners. In addition, Russia's business environment and its consequences for the role of business networks contribute to the relative advantage of entrepreneurial insiders (those already in business) to entrepreneurial outsiders (newcomers) in terms of new business start-ups. Institutions and Entrepreneurship Development in Russia:A Comparative Perspective AbstractIn this paper we use a comparative perspective to explore the ways in which institutions and networks have influenced entrepreneurial development in Russia. We utilize Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data to study the effects of the weak institutional environment in Russia on entrepreneurship, comparing it first with all available GEM country samples and second, in more detail, with Brazil and Poland. Our results suggest that Russia's institutional environment is important in explaining its relatively low levels of entrepreneurship development, where the latter is measured in terms of both number of startups and of existing business owners. In addition, Russia's business environment and its consequences for the role of business networks contribute to the relative advantage of entrepreneurial insiders (those already in business) to entrepreneurial outsiders (newcomers) in terms of new business start-ups.

We model and test the relationship between social and commercial entrepreneurship drawing on social capital theory. We propose that the country prevalence rate of social entrepreneurship is an indicator of constructible nation-level social capital and enhances the likelihood of individual commercial entry. We further posit that both social and commercial entrepreneurial entry is facilitated by certain formal institutions, namely strong property rights and (low) government activism, albeit the latter impacts each of these types of entrepreneurship differently. We apply bivariate discrete choice multi-level modelling to population-representative samples in 47 countries and find support for these hypotheses.

We explore the country-specific institutional characteristics likely to influence an individual's decision to become an entrepreneur. We focus on the size of the government, on freedom from corruption, and on 'market freedom' defined as a cluster of variables related to protection of property rights and regulation. We test these relationships by combining country-level institutional indicators for 47 countries with working age population survey data taken from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Our results indicate that entrepreneurial entry is inversely related to the size of the government, and more weakly to the extent of corruption. A cluster of institutional indicators representing 'market freedom' is only significant in some specifications. Freedom from corruption is significantly related to entrepreneurial entry, especially when the richest countries are removed from the sample but unlike the size of government, the results on corruption are not confirmed by country-level fixed effects models.

This paper compares the impact of institutions on men and women'