Work Experience Spanning Organization Types and Entrepreneurship

We examine how the movement of individuals during their career paths across multiple organization types shapes their entrepreneurial behavior. Using novel survey data, we find that individuals with work experience in multiple types of organizations were more likely to enter entrepreneurship. In contrast to prior work that examines skills-based mechanisms of this relationship, we argue that work experience from multiple organization types acts via affecting cognition, finding support for this in a follow up, randomized lab experiment. We conclude by discussing the empirical and theoretical importance of more deeply understanding the patterns of career experience and cognitive mechanisms