Renascent entrepreneurship

Why should individuals who have exited their firm consider re-entering into entrepreneurship, i.e. become renascent entrepreneurs? According to the logic of economic models of firm dynamics there is no reason to re-enter into entrepreneurship following firm failure. In contrast, research on nascent entrepreneurship has shown the positive effect of entrepreneurial experience on planning a new firm start. Based on empirical evidence from a database consisting of ex-entrepreneurs, this study shows that renascent entrepreneurship is a pervasive phenomenon. Next to passive learning, active learning plays an important role in the explanation of entrepreneurial preferences subsequent to firm exit. This study provides new insights into the role of prior knowledge and firm exit in the entrepreneurial process.     

Cultural entrepreneurship

Cultural entrepreneurship is a new character in the cultural sector. This paper characterizes the cultural entrepreneur paying homage to the hermeneutic approach of Don Lavoie and others. The challenge is to render the “cultural” meaningful. An invention is the highlighting of the rhetorical qualities of entrepreneurship. A cultural entrepreneur is the character who is entrepreneurial in the realization of cultural values, so is the conclusion.     

Risk-bearing and entrepreneurship

In the “Knightian” theory of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs provide insurance to workers by paying fixed wages and bear all the risk of production. This paper endogenizes entrepreneurial risk by allowing for optimal insurance contracts as well as occupational self-selection. Moral hazard prevents full insurance; increases in an agent's wealth then entail increases in risk borne. Thus, even under decreasing risk aversion, there are robust instances in which workers are wealthier than entrepreneurs. This empirically implausible result suggests that risk-based explanations for entrepreneurship are inadequate.     

The impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurship skills and motivation

This paper analyzes the impact of a leading entrepreneurship education program on college students’ entrepreneurship skills and motivation using an instrumental variables approach in a difference-in-differences framework. We exploit that the program was offered to students at one location of a school but not at another location of the same school. Location choice (and thereby treatment) is instrumented by the relative distance of locations to parents’ place of residence. The results show that the program does not have the intended effects: the effect on students’ self-assessed entrepreneurial skills is insignificant and the effect on the intention to become an entrepreneur is even negative.     

Hierarchies and entrepreneurship

We establish a correlation between the hierarchical structure of a firm and the likelihood of business creation among its former employees, using a sample of 16 million observations of Swedish workers and a novel proxy for hierarchies based on occupation data. Conditional on firm size and many other variables, employees in firms with more layers are less likely to enter entrepreneurship, to become self-employed, and to switch to another employer. The effects of layers are much stronger for business creation than for job-switching and they are stronger for entrepreneurship than for self-employment. We discuss two potential explanations for the distinctive hierarchy effect we find. Part of the effect could be to be due to preference sorting by employees, and part due to employees in firms with fewer layers having a broader range of skills. One test showing that the probability of entrepreneurship increases with their prior rank in an organization is consistent with ability sorting and inconsistent with preference sorting.     

Creatine and entrepreneurship

Creatine is a nitrogenous organic acid which supplies energy to body cells and enhances physical performance. Using the Young Finns Study combined with the Finnish Linked employer-employee data we show that quantities of creatine measured in 1980 prior to labour market entry affect entrepreneurial success as measured by capital income accumulation over the period 1993–2010 (in particular for females). However, we do not find evidence that creatine affects the propensity to become an entrepreneur. Our study contributes to the emerging literature on biomarkers and entrepreneurship.     

Housing price and entrepreneurship in China

Housing price has increased dramatically in China during the past decade. The appreciation of house value could relax credit constraint and thus encourage entrepreneurship. However, a house serves as both an important investment channel and a prerequisite for marriage in China. The continuous high return of investment in housing and intensified marriage market competition make house purchase a priority for young people and their parents, which would crowd out entrepreneurial activities. Using two large datasets, we find that high housing price in general discourages entrepreneurial activities for urban adults. For house owners, while house value appreciation has a positive wealth effect, the ratio of mortgage over income has a negative effect. For non-owners, a higher ratio of housing price over income corresponds to a lower probability of entrepreneurship. This study highlights the negative consequences of surging housing price on entrepreneurship in developing countries.     

Politics and entrepreneurship in the US

There is a strong belief that Republicans are more pro‐business than Democrats. In this paper, we investigate the causal impact of partisan allegiance of governors (Republican or Democratic) on entrepreneurial activity by exploiting random variation in close gubernatorial elections in 50 states over the last three decades in a regression discontinuity design. We find that Republican governors are no different than Democratic governors in their effects on entrepreneurship. Our findings are robust to several sensitivity checks.     

Attachment orientations and entrepreneurship

This research presents a theoretical model and examines it empirically to associate attachment orientations with various types of entrepreneurs. The results show clear evidence that attachment orientations not only predict an adult’s tendency to become an entrepreneur but also the type of entrepreneur he will become. Specifically, the results show that attachment anxiety is the dimension that is the most responsible for the variability of becoming an entrepreneur, while anxiety and avoidant dimensions predict his characteristics and attitudes as an entrepreneur. This paper makes five important contributions to the research of both attachment theory and entrepreneurship. First, it adds to the theoretical understanding of the psychology of entrepreneurs. Second, the attachment theory enables us to extend our understanding beyond the predictions of personality traits regarding entrepreneurial intentions in order to further predict the type of entrepreneur he will turn out to be. Third, it stresses the role of early childhood events regarding the prediction of future entrepreneurial orientation. Fourth, it uses a unique data set of real young entrepreneurs in a single industry homogenous design in Israel, which is known worldwide as a startup nation. Fifth, it focuses on the opportunity validation stage (rather than the opportunity identification of the resource allocation stages), which is often neglected in entrepreneur personality research.     

Latent entrepreneurship across nations

The paper studies latent entrepreneurship across nations. There are three main findings. First, large numbers of people in the industrial countries say they would prefer to be self-employed. Top of the international ranking of entrepreneurial spirit come Poland (with 80% saying so), Portugal and the USA; bottom of the table come Norway (with 27% saying so), Denmark and Russia. Second, for individuals the probability of preferring to be self-employed is strongly decreasing with age, while the probability of being self-employed is strongly increasing with age. Third, we show that self-employed individuals have noticeably higher job satisfaction than the employed, so people's expressed wish to run their business cannot easily be written off as mistaken. We speculate on why so much entrepreneurial spirit lies dormant.     

Social capital access and entrepreneurship

We investigate the effect of social capital access on entrepreneurship. Social capital helps entrepreneurs to overcome resource constraints. This is especially important in small communities where we often see a lack of market-oriented institutions such as venture capital firms. Entrepreneurs gain access to social capital via club memberships. Combining differences in the number of individual club memberships with differences in the importance of social capital across communities, we identify a causal small community mark-up effect of individual club memberships on entrepreneurship. Assuming that unobserved heterogeneity that might influence both the individual's selection into clubs and the occupational choice to be an entrepreneur is independent of community size, we find that the effect of club membership on the propensity to be an entrepreneur is 2.6 percentage points larger in small communities than in large communities. Robustness tests support the validity of our identifying assumption and results.     

The efficient-markets hypothesis and entrepreneurship

The author thanks D.S. Ball, C.P. Jones, M.L. Walden, Murray Rothbard, J.W. Wilson, and several anonymousReview of Austrian Economics reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Dynamic entrepreneurship and technology-based innovation

This paper seeks to distinguish between dynamic and static entrepreneurship. We define the construct of dynamic entrepreneurship in terms of Schumpeterian innovativeness and then develop a hypothesis suggesting that human capital is conducive to such action. In contrast, a paucity of human capital is more conducive to static entrepreneurship (defined in terms of organizational or ownership status). Based on a rich data set of entrepreneurs receiving research funding through the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, our empirical evidence suggests that academic-based human capital is positively correlated with dynamic behavior, whereas as business-based human capital and prior business experience is not.     

Confidence in formal institutions and reliance on informal institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article uses survey data to investigate the relationship between citizens’ confidence in formal institutions and reliance on informal institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). We find an endogenous substituting relationship and that the different institutional structures currently existing in the two entities in BiH are significantly linked to respondents’ confidence in formal and reliance on informal institutions. In addition, perceptions of higher indirect costs of institutions and a lack of their improvement are associated with a lower confidence in formal and a greater reliance on informal institutions; the minority ethnic groups in each region are less confident in formal and rely more on informal institutions compared to the majority group; and more reliance on informal institutions is found amongst males and respondents from urban areas.     

Gender,entrepreneurship and food security in Niger

In many African countries, the income generated from the informal sector and the entrepreneurship is particularly important for reducing poverty. Previous studies have not found clear evidence on the relationship between self‐employment by gender and food security. We argue that this may be a result of the gender inequality in resource accessibility. In this paper, we analyze the implication of household entrepreneurship on food security in Niger, where gender disparities in resource accessibility are reduced. We find that owning female‐managed non‐agricultural enterprises is positively related to food accessibility and food availability within female‐headed households. The results draw the attention on reducing gender differences in resource accessibility in entrepreneurship for improving food security.