Abstract
One of the most noteworthy attempts to increase the credibility and awareness of social entrepreneurship is the B Corporation certification. Certified B Corps are for-profit firms certified by the non-profit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. To date, our theoretical and empirical understanding of how the financing, performance and survival of B Corps differ from commercial ventures remains scarce. This limited understanding is an important issue because financing is a crucial resource for ventures to develop and grow. Moreover, firms need to understand better the short- and long-term internal effects of B Corp certification while prior research on certification in general has largely adopted an external focus. Next, previous studies have almost exclusively used samples of US B Corps. However, B Corps can be found across the globe. We lack a detailed understanding of how national systems of corporate governance, which are crucial in explaining access to external funding and availability of external funding, uniquely influence the financing and development of B Corps. This dissertation addresses the above issues and investigates for-profit social ventures in depth.
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