Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine what factors affect entrepreneurs with minority background to access public financial institutions’ funds in initiating and developing their new ventures. Following the signal theory, social capital theory and the liability of newness perspective, the effect of demographic characteristics of entrepreneurs were investigated and the differences between ethnic minority and non-minority entrepreneurs’ access to financial institutions’ funds were compared. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws on the data of 2,119 high technology and non-high technology firms from the Kauffman foundation survey. The empirical analysis was focussed on the characteristics of entrepreneurs of these new ventures and the nature of the financial arrangements of these businesses to test the theoretical framework. Findings – This study provides empirical evidence that ethnic minority entrepreneurs are less likely to access loans from financial institutions than non-minority entrepreneurs. Moreover, the education level of ethnic minority entrepreneurs was identified as a key factor to help them to access financial institutions’ funds. Research limitations/implications – The main limitation is that the data did not allow us to explore the actual reasons for observed correlations between entrepreneurs’ ethnic background, demographic characteristics and their use of financial institutions’ funds. Practical implications – Since the constraints in the access to financial resources greatly impact the success of new ventures, this study indicates through what factors minority entrepreneurs can increase their credence to get more financial support. In addition, it is also helpful for the loan managers of financial institutions to make rational decisions when they assess the application of minority entrepreneurs. Originality/value – This study enriches the understanding of minority entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurship literature. First, it aggregates major minorities in the USA and strives to identify systematically different financing behaviors of these minority entrepreneurs; second, it provides empirical investigation on the correlation of ethnic minority background and access to funds from financial institutions and the moderating effect of a set of demographic factors.

We focus on physically analyzing the origins of the numerical aperture (NA) and the spherical aberration of the microsphere with wavelength scale radius. We demonstrate that the microsphere naturally has negligible spherical aberration and high NA when the refractive index contrast (RIC) between the microsphere and its surrounding medium is about from 1.5 to 1.75. The reason is due to the spherical aberration compensation arising from the positive spherical aberration caused by the surface shape of the microsphere and the RIC and the negative spherical aberration caused by the focal shifts due to the wavelength scale dimension of the microsphere. We show that, only within the approximate region of 1.5 ≤ RIC ≤ 1.75 with the proper radius r of microsphere, the microsphere can generate a near-field focal spot with lateral resolution slightly beyond λ/2ns, which is also the lateral resolution limit of the dielectric microsphere. The r for each RIC can be obtained by optimizing r from 1.125λ/n o to 1.275λ/n o. Here λ, n s, and n o are the wavelength in vacuum and the refractive indices of microsphere and its surrounding medium, respectively. For the case of the near-field focusing, we also develop a simple transform formula used to calculate the new radius from the known radius of microsphere corresponding to the original illumination wavelength when the illumination wavelength is changed.

The increasingly competitive market of recruiting prospective students stimulates academic program administrators to adopt relationship marketing (RM) principles and to leverage the capacity of the Internet technologies in facilitating RM practices. The authors develop an operational framework to evaluate electronic RM (e-RM) features on the Web sites of selected postsecondary hospitality and tourism programs in the United States. As a result of the two-step cluster analysis procedure, the sampled programs are first grouped into two distinctive categories based on designed measures of preidentified e-RM features adopted on their Web sites. A logistic regression analysis then reveals that the program size and the level of the program (undergraduate vs. graduate) are significant indicators of the level of e-RM Web feature adoption.

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