04/27/2021
By Mary Lou Kelly

The Marketing, Entrepreneurship & Innovation department at the Manning School of Business invites you to Peiyi Jia's doctoral dissertation proposal defense on Friday, May 14 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. via Zoom.

Candidate Name: Peiyi Jia
Defense Date: Friday, May 14, 2021
Time: 2 to 3:30 p.m. (EDT time)
Location: Zoom meeting
Proposal Title: Three Essays on Entrepreneurial Financing: Remittances, Narratives, and Business Models

Advisor: Sunny Li Sun, Ph.D., Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, UMass Lowell

Dissertation Committee:

  • Yi Yang, Ph.D., Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, UMass Lowell
  • Michael P. Ciuchta, Ph.D., Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, UMass Lowell
  • Charlotte Ren, Ph.D., Fox School of Business, Temple University

Abstract:

This dissertation aims to advance the understanding of entrepreneurial financing from macro and micro perspectives. This dissertation consists of three essays on remittances, narratives, and business models.

In the first essay, I examine the relationship between migrant remittances and the home country’s informal economy from an entrepreneurial perspective. Drawing on the entrepreneurial mobility and informality literature, I argue that migrant remittances not only serve as an alternative financial resource for entrepreneurs in the informal economy to grow the business but also can be used to develop the human capital and entrepreneurial capability required for the transition to formality. I develop a mediation model suggesting that migrant remittances reduce the home country’s informal economy through enhancing venture funding availability.

In the second essay, I investigate how new ventures construct unique stories to influence public investors’ perceptions and how venture capitalist (VC)-backed ventures differ in telling their stories in IPOs. Drawing on the sensemaking and sense-giving perspective, I develop a multiple mediation model that identifies entrepreneurial narratives and customer narratives in the IPO prospectus as two mediators through which VC presence affects a venture’s IPO performance. The results suggest that VC presence positively affects a company’s IPO performance through enhancing the entrepreneurial narratives and customer narratives conveyed in the prospectus.

In the third essay, I study the role of business models in entrepreneurial financing. Based on an activity system perspective on the business model (Zott & Amit, 2010), I examine the relationship between the subscription business model and IPO performance. With a particular focus on the new venture’s internationalization and partnership, I argue that new ventures that adopt a subscription business model are more likely to scale up with international operations and partnerships. Public investors treat international operations and partnerships as two effective ways for IPO ventures to explore the growth potential and improve performance. Hence they give a more favorable valuation to the subscription business model.