Why do some people become entrepreneurs (and others don't)? Why are firms so heterogeneous, and many firms so small? To start, the paper briefly documents evidence from the empirical literature that the relationship between entrepreneurship and education is U-shaped, that many entrepreneurs...

Risk attitudes have an impact on not only the decision to become an entrepreneur but also the survival and failure rates of entrepreneurs. Whereas recent research underpins the theoretical proposition of a positive correlation between risk attitudes and the decision to become an entrepreneur,...

This paper systematically investigates whether different kinds of personality characteristics influence entrepreneurial development. On the basis of a large, representative household panel survey, we examine the extent to which the Big Five traits and further personality characteristics, which...

What makes the entrepreneurial personality is the key question we seek to answer in the special issue of the Journal of Economic Psychology on "Personality and Entrepreneurship". The contributions are clustered around questions regarding the linkage between personality, socio-economic factors...

Using a large representative German data set and various concepts of self-employment, this paper tests the "jack-of-all-trades" view of entrepreneurship by Lazear (AER 2004). Consistent with its theoretical assumptions we find that self-employed individuals perform more tasks and that their work...

Experimental evidence reveals that there is a strong willingness to trust and to act in both positively and negatively reciprocal ways. So far it is rarely analyzed whether these variables of social cognition influence everyday decision making behavior. We focus on entrepreneurs who are...

We assess the relevance of formal education for the productivity of the self-employed and distinguish between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

Small Business Administration (SBA) loans have long been one of the most significant policy interventions in the U.S. affecting firm behavior, but little is known about their outcomes. This paper estimates the effects on employment using a list of all SBA loans linked to annual data on all U.S....

Small business activity and female entrepreneurship have become increasingly important features of the UK economy since the start of the Great Recession. In this paper, we re-examine the impact of liquidity constraints on new business formation in an instrumental variables framework, using a...