Abstract: Research on Social Entrepreneurship (SE) has increased exponentially during the past decade. Despite the fact that this social phenomenon has aroused the interest of all, many aspects have not yet been fully investigated. The objective of this paper is to analyse how the factors that define the behaviour of social entrepreneurs are affected by the perception that they have about the development of businesses focused on the solution of social problems in their countries. Our study contributes to fill an important gap detected in SE research: the lack of international empirical quantitative studies. We perform an empirical multivariable analysis using 2015 GEM data related to SE, with a sample that contains information of 17,778 entrepreneurs from 46 different countries, being 6,470 social entrepreneurs. The empirical analysis is carried out applying binary response models, introducing interaction terms to analyse the moderating effect of the development of social businesses in each country. Our results show that the entrepreneurs? perception of the development of social businesses in their countries exerts a moderating effect over three different groups of factors: 1) the factors related to self-perception about entrepreneurship (including values, perceptions, and entrepreneurial skills); 2) the factors related to entrepreneurs? perception of societal values and the entrepreneurship environment; and 3) the country and demographic and economic factors (gender, age and education level). This moderating effect has very important implications, especially for policymakers. Our results show that the development of social businesses in each country could amplify some effects, both positively and negatively. Therefore, the design and implementation of policies to support SE must consider the moderating role of the perception of the social business environment on the entrepreneurial behaviour, because it could affect the effectiveness of such policies.

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