Introduction

The topic of "entrepreneurial finance" involves many issues, including but not limited to the risks and returns to being an entrepreneur, financial contracting, business planning, capital gaps and the availability of capital, market booms and busts, public policy, and international differences in entrepreneurial finance stemming from differences in laws, institutions, and cultures. As these issues are so extremely broad and complex, the academic and practitioner literature on the topic usually focuses on at most one or two of these issues at one time. This article offers to provide here a comprehensive picture of all of these issues dealing with different sources of entrepreneurial finance and different issues with financing entrepreneurs. The article outlines the organization of the book.