Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to study how the effect of entrepreneurial cognition on women opportunity-based entrepreneurship (WOE) is moderated by informal institutions. We employed data collected from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), Hofstede cultural dimensions, Index of Economic Freedom (IEF) and World Bank merged to build a data set of 446,952 observations from 89 countries for the period of 2010-2017. Using multi-level methodology, we observed that the positive effect of entrepreneurship readiness on WOE is moderated by cultural dimensions. Our results uncovered that country-level individualism and masculinity intensify the positive relationship between individual entrepreneurial cognition and women opportunity-based entrepreneurs while the country-level power distance and uncertainty avoidance weaken the positive relation between female entrepreneurial cognition and the likelihood of women entering opportunity-based entrepreneurial activities. We discussed the implication of findings in theory and policy for encouraging women opportunity-based entrepreneurship in respect to national culture.