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We investigate how institutions—a crucial ingredient of national entrepreneurial ecosystems—affect entrepreneurial intention—latent entrepreneurship activity. We discuss how the combination of formal and informal institutional conditions, related to government size, taxation and corruption, shape entrepreneurial intentions in national entrepreneurial ecosystems. We apply a mixed process estimation of simultaneously unrelated systems of equations to an unbalanced panel of 76 countries during 2005-2015. Our estimates show how various combinations of institutional conditions can be used to enable entrepreneurial ecosystems to support entrepreneurship activity. We extend earlier research on governance and institutions, and respond to calls within the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature for the analysis of a variety of institutional characteristics. We also extend the ecosystem to a national context.