Failing firms and successful entrepreneurs: serial entrepreneurship as a temporal portfolio

Entrepreneurial performance is almost always confounded with firm performance. In this paper we argue for an instrumental view of the firm by formally showing that entrepreneurs can amplify their expected success rates by designing their careers as temporal portfolios that exploit contagion processes embedded in serial entrepreneurship. The advantages to holding concurrent portfolios that exploit heterogeneity are well known. The same advantages may be achieved in the serial context through contagion. Our model exploits an observation due to William Feller on the near equivalence of the two, statistically speaking. It also leads to empirically plausible implications about the size distribution of firms in the economy and illustrates the relevance of considering firms and entrepreneurs as distinct loci of analysis.     

Latent Class approach to analyze children’s nutritional trajectory and school dropout. A longitudinal population-based application

The study of the nutritional status is relevant during the entire life course, but in children it is relevant as malnutrition may be a marker of underlying functional and mental health deficits. Evidence of the association between malnutrition and school dropout is not conclusive. Our aim was to analyze children’s nutritional trajectory measured using their Body Mass Index (BMI) of a Uruguayan cohort and its association with school dropout. With this purpose, Latent Class and Joint Latent Class Mixed Models were fitted to children’s cohort study (N?=?1392 girls and 1492 boys) in sex-stratified analyses adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics. We identified latent classes of boys and girls with similar BMI trajectories during school years and differences in relevant socioeconomic and anthropometric characteristics. Results indicated that boys dropped out at younger ages than girls. No association between age of school dropout and nutritional trajectory classes was found. None of the classes exhibited a deficit or decrease in BMI trajectories during school ages, although the obesity and overweight classes could be of concern. Results suggested no significant association between obesity or overweight and age of school dropout for children up to 14 years old. Future research on other samples may inform about trajectories in higher educational levels.