Three essays on the dynamics of entrepreneurs in the labor market

New firms are a driving force of innovation and creative destruction, promoting social mobility and welfare creation. These result from the effort of entrepreneurial individuals who identify an opportunity, evaluate it, and create new organizations to exploit its business potential. Entrepreneurship is connected to existing organizations because the phenomenon of new firm foundation can be viewed in the vast majority of cases as a career choice of workers who found new firms following a period in wage employment. Extant literature in labor economics however prevalently focuses on individuals viewed as employees, thus overlooking the dynamic and transitory nature of entrepreneurship. This thesis consists of three essays on entrepreneurship that integrate the labor market literature with the entrepreneurship research. The first essay considers the entrepreneurial implications the founders pre-entry experiences in the labor market, by studying the impact of a varied career pattern in connection to the performance of new ventures. The second essay regards one important dimension of labor markets, i.e. the turnover of workers, in connection to entrepreneurship. The essay provides a dynamic analysis of an experience in entrepreneurship and its impact on workers turnover. The third essay explores how the existing organizations impact on the choices to become an entrepreneur. In particular, it is shown that a firm attribute such as tournament might produce a different effect on entrepreneurial individuals working in small firms as opposed to those employed in larger firms. All the essays draw on the IDA database, the integrated database for labor market research that is maintained by Statistics Denmark. The rich set of information available in IDA makes it possible to track individuals, their employers and the founders of new firms, thus enabling the study of entrepreneurs in connection to their experience in the labor market.