Persons with disabilities face much higher unemployment than non-disabled people (32% in Switzerland; up to 65% in the US), and while entrepreneurship could counter this, a key barrier is lack of access to start-up capital rather than motivation or education. This project investigates whether and why entrepreneurs with visible disabilities are discriminated against in entrepreneurial financing, focusing on investors’ cognitive processes. Using field data, interviews, and experiments (including eye-tracking and EEG), it aims to identify the disability penalty, its causes, and strategies to mitigate it for entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers.

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