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What Makes an Entrepreneur?
Abstract
This article uses various micro data sets to study entrepreneurship. Consistent with the existence of capital constraints on potential entrepreneurs, the estimates imply that the probability of self‐employment depends positively upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift. When directly questioned in interview surveys, potential entrepreneurs say that raising capital is their principal problem. Consistent with our theoretical model's predictions, the self‐employed report higher levels of job and life satisfaction than employees. Childhood psychological test scores, however, are not strongly correlated with later self‐employment.
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Citations
Cited by
Dolan, P., Peasgood, T., & White, M. (2008) · Journal of Economic Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.joep.2007.09.001 · Cited by 3,121
Inequality and happiness: are Europeans and Americans different?
Alesina, A., Di Tella, R., & MacCulloch, R. (2004) · Journal of Public Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2003.07.006 · Cited by 1,752
Liquidity Constraints, Household Wealth, and Entrepreneurship
Hurst, E., & Lusardi, A. (2004) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/381478 · Cited by 1,296
The Entrepreneurial Propensity of Women
Langowitz, N., & Minniti, M. (2007) · Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6520.2007.00177.x · Cited by 1,098
Entrepreneurship and role models
Bosma, N., Hessels, J., Schutjens, V., Praag, M. V., & Verheul, I. (2012) · Journal of Economic Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.joep.2011.03.004 · Cited by 784
Metadata
- Authors
- Blanchflower, D. G., & Oswald, A. J.
- Venue
- Journal of Labor Economics
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1998-01
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 26-60
- ISSN
- 0734-306X (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5307
- OpenAlex
- W2170921686
- Cited by
- 2,319
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 93.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.