Methodology
Access to Venture Capital
In order to test my first hypothetical impact upon access to venture capital, I plan to conduct a quantitative analysis that longitudinally measures venture capital funding activity in Chile over time. More specifically, I am interested in determining if the establishment of the Start-Up Chile program in 2010 has had any impact on the amount of venture capital activity in Chile in the last ten years. I hypothesize that due to the establishment of Start-Up Chile program in 2010, it directly attracted more investors to the region to invest in its portfolio of start-ups, and this greater access to capital also precipitated in positive spillover effects for the funding of non-accelerated start-ups in Chile as well.
In order to test my hypothesis, I have compiled a dataset, utilizing the database CapitalIQ, consisting of publicly announced venture capital deals in Chile and greater Latin America from 2000 to 2019. Given that 2020 has not yet finished, I do not plan to use data from this year. For more details, I delve more in-depth about the intricacies of this dataset in the "Datasets" section of this exhibit. Witht this data, I plan to visualize the amount of ventural capital transactions over this time period. I hope to find trends that indicate that there was generally more transaction activity after the Start-Up Chile program's founding in 2010. In addition to this, I plan to run a regression analysis using R that will compare the mean of venture capital transactions from 2000 to 2009 and 2010 to 2019. My hypothesis is that the mean of the 2010 to 2019 sample will be statistically proven to be greater than the 2000 to 2009 sample mean, thus inferring that Start-Up Chile may have significantly impacted access to venture capital after its arrival in 2010.
In addition to my analysis focused on Chile, I also plan to leverage the data I have regarding venture capital transaction activity in the rest of Latin America as well. I will utilize data visualizations tools like Tableau to show how Chile's venture capital activity fares in comparison to its Latin American peers over time. This will provide contextual evidence to help us understand whether the venture capital trends analyzed are unique to Chile or not.
Entrepreneurial Activity
In testing my second hypothetical impact upon Chile's entrepreneurial activity, I plan to conduct a quantitative analysis that longitudinally measures entrepreneurial intentions and activity in Chile over time. Similar to the method I used to test my firsy hypothetical impact upon access to venture capital, I am interested in determining if there was any significant change entrepreneurial intentions and activity amongst the Chilean population upon the program's arrival in 2010. I hypothesize that the arrival of the program had a positive effect upon the entrepreneurial culture of the country, resulting in greater levels of entrepeneurial intentions and activity in the nation starting with the year 2010.
Moreover, I will test my hypothesis using survey data gathered by the Global Entrepreneruship Monitor, an international consortium based at Babson college that measures behavior and attitudes towards entrepreneurship in over one hundred countries on an annual basis. I will go into details about the dataset further in the next section, but I essentially have access to survey data regarding entrepreneurial intentions and activity in Chile from 2002 to 2019. Once again, I plan to use data visualization tools like Tableau to demonstrate how entrepreneurial intentions and activity has changed over time. In addition, I also plan to run a regression analysis using R that will compare the mean values of entrepreneurial intentions and activity of 2002 to 2009 with the values of 2010 to 2019. My hypothesis is that the regression will show that the mean of the values from 2010 to 2019 will be statistically proven to be greater than those of 2002 to 2009. If my hypothesis is proven true, then it would potentially infer that Start-Up Chile contributed to greater entrepreneurial intention and activity in the past 10 years.