are the self employed really jacks of all trades testing the assumptions and implications of lazear s theory of entrepreneurship with german data 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 am econ rev 94 2 208 211 2004 consistent with its theoretical assumptions we find that self employed individuals perform more tasks and that their work requires more skills than that of paid employees in contrast to lazear s assumptions however self employed individuals do not just need more basic but also more expert skills than employees our results also provide rather limited support for the idea that human capital investment patterns differ between those who become self employed and those ending up in paid employment

the higher returns to formal education for entrepreneurs versus employees how valuable is formal education for entrepreneurs income relative to employees and if the income returns to formal education are different for entrepreneurs vis a vis employees what might be a plausible explanation to explore these questions we analyze a large representative us panel we show that entrepreneurs have higher returns to formal education than employees we refer to this as the entrepreneurship returns puzzle we run post hoc analyses to explore a number of potential explanations of this puzzle indirectly our analysis indicates that the higher returns to formal education for entrepreneurs might be due to the fewer organizational constraints they face leading to more personal control over how to use their human capital compared to employees

the chronology and intellectual trajectory of american entrepreneurship education 1876 1999 abstract since the first entrepreneurship class held in 1947 the academic discipline of entrepreneurship s growth is described using a chronology of three domains courses supplemental infrastructures and publications a 100 item chronology of entrepreneurship education in the usa from 1876 through 1999 is offered and analyzed the major findings are 1 in the usa the field has reached maturity and 2 growth is likely outside business schools and outside the usa the major problems include a glut of journals a narrowing focus on top tier publications potential american stagnation and a shortage of faculty overall exacerbated by a shortage of phd programs

entrepreneurship selection and performance a meta analysis of the impact of education in developing economies this meta analytical review of empirical studies of the impact of schooling on entrepreneurship in selection and performance in developing economies looks at variations impact across specific characteristics of the studies a marginal year of schooling in developing economies raises enterprise income by an average of 5 5 percent which is close to the average return in industrial countries the return varies however by gender rural or urban residence and the share of agriculture in the economy furthermore more educated workers typically end up in wage employment and prefer nonfarm entrepreneurship to farming the education effect that separates workers into self employment and wage employment is stronger for women possibly stronger in urban areas and also stronger in the least developed economies where agriculture is more dominant and literacy rates are lower

are women graduates jacquelines of all trades challenging lazear s view on entrepreneurship this study challenges the basic reasoning behind lazear s theory on entrepreneurship 2005 based on the key motive of maximizing one s lifetime income lazear posits that individuals with a balanced set of skills should have a higher probability of being self employed his jack of all trades hypothesis presumes that entrepreneurs need sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to succeed while paid employees benefit from being specialists in a certain area demanded by the labor market because most women led businesses are neither based on the motive of making money nor are they growth oriented we argue that maximizing their lifetime income is not the main motivation of many women to start a business however we argue that lazear s theory can be extended to motivations that are mostly stated for women entrepreneurs as well we apply it to a specific representative sample of 1384 women graduates in germany and test our hypothesis with logit regression a dichotomized measure indicating whether a women graduate was self employed n 706 or not n 678 served as the dependent variable our results widely confirm lazear s assumption for women graduates who run relatively small businesses in terms of sales and employment professional training balanced industry experience and balanced entrepreneurship based self efficacy increase the probability of being self employed solo self employed tend to have balanced industry experience more often than those being in a team or having employees lazear s theory has male as the norm and as such does not readily apply to the case of women but could and should be extended to women s specifics

task specific human capital since gary becker s 1964 seminal work the theoretical and empirical literature on human capital has focused almost exclusively on general purpose and firm specific human capital in this paper we discuss the implications of a third type of human capital which we call task specific and which we believe is potentially as commonplace and as important as the two classic types by task specific human capital we mean that some of the human capital an individual acquires on the job is specific to the tasks being performed as opposed to being specific to the firm in other words task specific human capital is the simple but plausible idea that much of the human capital accumulated on the job is due to task specific learning by doing the idea of task specific human capital is closely related to occupationand industryspecific human capital in each case human capital is specific to the nature of the work not specific to the firm hence when capital is accumulated multiple firms value the capital so most or even all of the value of the capital will be reflected in the worker s wage the main difference between the idea of task specific human capital and occupationand industryspecific human capital is in how the idea is applied we argue that task specific human capital has much wider applicability than suggested so far by the occupationand industry specific human capital literatures the specific issues we address are cohort effects job design and promotions another argument in the literature closely related to ours is the classic argument of adam smith 1776 in the wealth of nations concerning returns to specialization smith s argument was that due to learning by doing at the level of the task productivity can be enhanced by having each job entail fewer tasks we believe that smith was correct in focusing on learningby doing at the level of the task as an important idea for thinking about organizations the goal of our paper is to describe some of the other implications of this idea for the design and operation of organizations

the effectiveness of active labour market policies a meta analysis this paper provides a meta analysis of microeconometric evaluation studies on the effectiveness of active labor market policies the analysis is built upon a systematically assembled data set of causal impact estimates from 57 experimental and quasi experimental studies providing 654 estimates published between january 1990 and december 2017 we distinguish between the short and longer term impacts in our analysis at 6 12 24 and 36 months after program start after correcting for publication bias and country specific macroeconomic characteristics subsidized labor and public employment programs have negative short term impacts which gradually turn positive in the longer run schemes with enhanced services including job search assistance and training programs do not have these negative short term effects and stay positive from 6 until 36 months after program start

do entrepreneurs create jobs many countries support the creation of new firms such policy is based on the presumption that the total number of jobs increases when a person moves from unemployment or regular employment to self employment in this paper the link between self employment and overall employment is analyzed the empirical analysis based on panel data of swedish counties from 1976 1995 pays particular attention to simultaneity issues the results suggest that self employment may have a significant positive effect on overall employment

releasing constraints to growth or pushing on a string policies and performance of mexican micro firms abstract using firm level data from mexico this paper investigates the firm characteristics associated with participation in credit markets access to training tax payments and membership in business associations we find that firms which participate in these institutions exhibit significantly higher profits moreover firms that borrow from formal or informal sources and those that pay taxes are significantly more likely to stay in business but firms that received credit exhibit lower rates of income growth these results persist when firm characteristics that are arguably correlated with unobserved entrepreneurial ability are controlled for our findings suggest that the significant within country differences in firm productivity observed in developing economies are due in part to market and government failures that limit the ability of micro firms to reach their optimal sizes

on the design of hierarchies coordination versus specialization we consider an economy that has to decide how assets are to be used agents have ideas but these ideas conflict we suppose that decision making authority is determined by hierarchy each asset ha

is public r d a complement or substitute for private r d a review of the econometric evidence is public r d spending complementary and thus additional to private r d spending or does it substitute for and tend to crowd out private r d conflicting answers are given to this question we survey the body of available econometric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years a framework for analysis of the problem is developed to help organize and summarize the findings of econometric studies based on time series and cross section data from various levels of aggregation laboratory firm industry country the findings overall are ambivalent and the existing literature as a whole is subject to the criticism that the nature of the experiment s that the investigators envisage is not adequately specified we conclude by offering suggestions for improving future empirical research on this issue

success in entrepreneurship a complementarity between schooling and wage work experience what makes a successful entrepreneur using danish register data we find strong support for the hypothesis that theoretical skills from schooling and practical skills acquired through wage work are complementary inputs in the human capital earnings function of entrepreneurs in fact we find that schooling only pays off in combination with wage work experience as the returns to schooling are insignificant when the entrepreneur has no wage work experience the results are extremely robust toward more flexible specifications including fixed effect estimations dealing with unobserved heterogeneity furthermore the interaction term is negligible for non entrepreneurs suggesting that the complementarity between wage work experience and schooling is a distinctive characteristic of entrepreneurs

competition under financial distress this paper presents a link between product market competition and the financial situation in particular asset composition of firms based on capital market imperfections consistent with the popular view the model shows that firms under financial distress use aggressive pricing to generate cash firms resort to aggressive pricing in order to reshape their asset composition between nonliquid and liquid assets when new information renders their current composition nonoptimal in contrast to the vast literature on inventories that has given little attention to pricing the model links pricing and inventory behavior low pricing is used as a source of internal funding copyright 1996 by blackwell publishing ltd

the effect of capital structure on a firm s liquidation decision abstract a firm s liquidation can impose costs on its customers workers and suppliers an agency relationship between these individuals and the firm exists in that the liquidation decision controlled by the firm as the agent affects other individuals the customers workers and suppliers as principals the analysis in this paper suggests that capital structure can control the incentive conflict problem of this relationship by serving as a pre positioning or bonding mechanism appropriate selection of capital structure assures that incentives are aligned so that the firm implements the ex ante value maximizing liquidation policy

selling costs and switching costs explaining retail gasoline margins recent theoretical work has shown that price discrimination can take place in imperfectly competitive as well as monopoly markets the persistence of higher retail margins on unleaded than on leaded gasoline during the 1980s suggests that discrimination may occur even in very competitive markets this article studies a number of cost based explanations for such gasoline pricing as well as the possibility of price discrimination the analysis indicates that gas stations discriminate against groups of customers who are less likely to switch to another station the conclusions highlight the influence of shopping or search costs on pricing decisions even in markets thought to be quite competitive

the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurship skills and motivation this paper analyzes the impact of a leading entrepreneurship education program on college students entrepreneurship skills and motivation using an instrumental variables approach in a difference in differences framework we exploit that the program was offered to students at one location of a school but not at another location of the same school location choice and thereby treatment is instrumented by the relative distance of locations to parents place of residence the results show that the program does not have the intended effects the effect on students self assessed entrepreneurial skills is insignificant and the effect on the intention to become an entrepreneur is even negative

wage differentials in brazil theory and evidence the investigation of wage determination and wage differentials in developing countries has concentrated on the effects of human capital and different sources of segmentation associated with institutional arrangements and structural characteristics on earnings in this article we use micro data for brazil for the 1980s and 1990s to test several competitive theories and models with segmentation explained by efficiency wages we find that unmeasured abilities and efficiency wage models seem to play a role in wage determination while compensating differentials and transitory difference theories were found to be irrelevant to wages formation

evaluation of deadweight spending in regional enterprise financing tokila a and haapanen m evaluation of deadweight spending in regional enterprise financing regional studies the problem of deadweight spending has been previously studied using diverse methods however regional variations in deadweight spending have not yet been considered an evaluation of regional business subsidies in finland during 2000 2003 is conducted the analysis reveals regional differences in deadweight spending in proportional and particularly in monetary terms deadweight spending is dependent on many firm project and regional level factors which also largely account for regional differences however there seems to be some regional variation in deadweight spending that originates from differences in the subsidy processes among regions tokila a et haapanen m evaluer les investissements non productifs dans l aide regionale a la creation d entreprise regional studies dans le passe la question des investissements non productifs a ete etudiee a partir de diverses methodes cepend

interindustry wage differentials in brazil why workers who have seemingly identical characteristics receive different wages has been a recurrent problem in labor economics and has received much attention lately in the debate on the efficiency wage models ewms in this article we extend this line of research to a less developed economy by testing the existence of interindustry wage differentials in brazilian industries the empirical analysis is based on cross sectional data on individuals working in the manufacturing industry in sao paulo one of the greater industrial areas in brazil the brazilian case shows a number of similarities to previous studies as there is a significant and stable pattern of interindustry wage differentials however it also raises additional issues namely a relationship between technology and wages that extends beyond the size effect as well as the similarities of the wage structure across countries even when workers characteristics are controlled the results have also proven to be quite robust to methodological estimation issues that is changes in the control variables and full correction for the least squares sampling error

quantifying consumer perception of a financially distressed company to measure how consumers respond to negative information about the financial health of a durable goods producer i use the prices at which vehicles sell in secondary markets to quantify consumer perception of the chrysler corporation during the period surrounding the chrysler loan guarantee act of 1979 i focus on chrysler s july 31 1979 announcement of financial distress and request for assistance from the u s government the trend in the prices of used chrysler vehicles relative to those of its american competitors provides strong support for the claim that consumers reduce their willingness to pay for the goods of a financially distressed company

thinking about the firm a review of daniel spulber s the theory of the firm in this review i describe how economists have moved beyond the firm as a black box to incorporate incentives internal organization and firm boundaries i then turn to the way that the theory of the firm is treated in daniel spulber s book the theory of the firm microeconomics with endogenous entrepreneurs firms markets and organizations spulber s goal is to explain why firms exist how they are established and what they contribute to the economy to accomplish this spulber defines a firm to be a transaction institution whose objectives differ from those of its owners for spulber this separation is the key difference between the firm and direct exchange between consumers i raise questions about whether this is a useful basis for a theory of the firm jel d21

returns to schooling in self employment abstract this paper challenges the idea that returns to schooling in self employment are similar to those in wage work by establishing a non linear relationship with very low returns for most educational levels in self employment we conclude that previous log linear specifications in the self employment literature have missed significant variation in the true relationship between education and earnings

are nascent entrepreneurs jacks of all trades a test of lazear s theory of entrepreneurship with german data in a recent paper edward lazear proposed the jack of all trades view of entrepreneurship based on a coherent model of the choice between self employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur the intuition behind this proposition is that entrepreneurs must have sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to put together the many ingredients needed for survival and success in a business while for paid employees it suffices and pays to be a specialist in the field demanded by the job taken this study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing lazear s hypothesis using a large recent representative sample of the german population the empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of becoming a nascent entrepreneur and the regional stratification of the sample into account the results illustrate the statistical significance and economic importance of the jack of all t

redefining business success distinguishing between closure and failure new firms are believed to have high closure rates and these closures are believed to be failures but two u s census bureau data sources illustrate that these assumptions may not be justified the business information tracking series bits showed that about half of new employer firms survive beyond four years and the characteristics of business owners cbo showed that about a third of closed businesses were successful at closure the cbo also made it possible to compare results of models of business survival and business success but because of non response bias logit models were used similar to previous studies firms having more resources that were larger with better financing and having employees were found to have better chances of survival factors that were characteristic of closure such as having no start up capital and having a relatively young owner were also common in businesses considered successful at closure hence few defining factors can be isolated leading to true failures the significant proportion of businesses that closed while successful calls into question the use of business closure as a meaningful measure of business outcome it appears that many owners may have executed a planned exit strategy closed a business without excess debt sold a viable business or retired from the work force it is also worth noting that such inborn factors as race and gender played negligible roles in determining survivability and success at closure

local discouragement and global collapse a theory of coordination avalanches abstract we study a dynamic game in which all players initially possess the same information and coordinate on a high level of activity eventually players with a long string of bad experiences become inactive this prospect can cause a coordination avalanche in which all activity in the population stops coordination avalanches are part of pareto efficient equilibria they can occur at any point in the game their occurrence does not depend on the true state of nature and allowing players to exchange information may merely hasten their onset we present applications to search markets organizational meltdown and inefficient computer upgrades jel d83

unions and interindustry wage differentials abstract we investigate the importance of trade unions in collective bargaining in the context of a developing country manufacturing labor market the methodology we adopt to estimate wage differentials follows the method proposed by haisken denew j p and schmidt c m 1997 review of economics and statistics 79 516 521 since it improves on the standard procedure popularized by krueger a b and summers l h 1988 econometrica 56 193 259 our findings indicate that wage dispersion is far greater in the unionized sector of brazilian manufacturing in contrast to evidence from other countries

capital market imperfections and countercyclical markups theory and evidence during recessions output prices seem to rise relative to wages and raw material prices one explanation is that imperfectly competitive firms compete less aggressively during recessions that is markups of price over marginal cost are countercyclical the authors present a model of countercyclical markups based on capital market imperfections during recessions liquidity constrained firms boost short run profits by raising prices to cut their investments in market share the authors provide evidence from the supermarket industry in support of this theory during regional and macroeconomic recessions more financially constrained supermarket chains raise their prices relative to less financially constrained chains copyright 1996 by american economic association

an examination of the substitutability of founders human and financial capital in emerging business ventures abstract undoubtedly access to financial capital and other resources is an important antecedent of new venture performance indeed inadequate financial resources often are cited as a primary reason why emerging businesses fail barren 1989 mcqueen 1989 otterbourg 1989 rujoub cook and hay 1995 yet there is some feeling among scholars that competent founders will find a way of coming up with necessary resources and capital chandler and hanks 1994 timmons 1990 thorne 1989 in this study we seek to better understand and provide insight into the factors that determine the amount of money needed to start a business and the factors that drive the decisions of whether such funding should come from founder savings or from outside sources we explore two questions 1 what factors are associated with the amount of initial capital raised and 2 what factors determine the mix of founder savings versus financial capital from outside sources that create the initial capital structure we seek to answer these questions using a sample of 102 manufacturing and service firms between 3 and 7 years of age these firms were categorized as manufacturing retail wholesale and business services in general the evidence supports our hypotheses the amount of financial capital at start up varies by industry of key importance in this study human and financial capital appear to be substitutable the analysis shows that on average firms with high levels of founder human capital and low levels of initial financial capital perform similarly to firms that have low levels of founder human capital and high levels of financial capital subgroup analysis provides insights into the degree of substitutability this finding suggests that founders with strong background experience may be able to start businesses that survive and thrive with less financial capital than their less experienced counterparts the proportion of initial capital provided by the founder differs significantly across industry types in more capital intensive industries founders provide a smaller proportion of the start up capital interestingly the amount of initial capital provided by the founder does not vary significantly across industry types this suggests that the amount of initial capital provided by the founder may result from contributing all they can give to the business which appears to be similar across business types finally founders perceptions of their ability to recognize and take advantage of opportunity are positively related to the proportion of initial capital provided by the founder this research provides insights into the factors that appear to drive the initial capital intensity and structure to provide better understanding of this phenomenon future research could investigate such practices as bootstrapping asset sharing or other techniques that allow founders to control resources without requiring ownership

the impact of entrepreneurship programs on minorities we document the impact of an entrepreneurship training program on startup activity of minorities females and non caucasians we compare entrepreneurial activity between applicants who are accepted into the program with applicants who are program finalists but not accepted we find that the effect of the program is small for minorities in the short run however the effect of the program is more pronounced for minorities likelihood of longer run startup activity whereas the effect on non minorities is small and statistically insignificant we suggest that such programs are most effective for individuals that may otherwise have limited access to entrepreneurial opportunities

education language and youth entrepreneurship in chad this study aims to assess the effect of education language arabic or french on the probability of being self employed in chad mainly we make use of a recursive bivariate probit model and matching techniques to assess the effect as well as to remedy to the endogeneity problem overall the analysis suggests that youths with arabic language education are more likely to be self employed however most of them specialise in modest informal micro enterprises these results can help to shed light on the education language implications and then can help policymakers to design appropriate policies to foster youth entrepreneurship in chad

the boundaries of the firm revisited why do firms exist what is their function and what determines their scope these remain the central questions in the economics of organization they are also central questions for business executives and corporate strategists the worldwide volume of corporate mergers and acquisitions exceeded 1 6 trillion in 1997 it is hard to imagine that so much time effort and investment bankers fees would be spent on adjusting firm boundaries unless there was some underlying economic gain indeed the exceptional levels of merger and acquisition activity over the past two decades are a strong indication that economically significant forces do determine organizational boundaries the study of firm boundaries originated with the famous essay by coase 1937 who raised the question of why we observe so much economic activity inside formal organizations if as economists commonly argue markets are such powerful and effective mechanisms for allocating scarce resources coase s answer was in terms of the costs of transacting in a world of imperfect information when the transaction costs of market exchange are high it may be less costly to coordinate production through a formal organization than through a market in large part thanks to the work of williamson 1975 1985 recent decades have seen a resurgence of interest in coase s fundamental insight that firm boundaries can be explained by efficiency considerations our understanding of firm boundaries has been sharpened by identifying more precisely the nature and sources of transaction costs in different circumstances in the process the focus of

the effects of human capital interventions on entrepreneurial performance in industrialized countries this paper provides a systematic review of studies on the effects of human capital interventions on entrepreneurial performance in industrialized countries we identify 21 experimental and quasi experimental studies published before september 2018 these studies examine the effects of business training formal education and entrepreneurship education their performance outcomes include firm profits firm size and entrepreneurial earnings the main finding across these studies is that these interventions do not have statistically significant effects formal education is the only exception showing positive effects on firm profits and entrepreneurial earnings yet these effects are small in magnitude evidence is inconclusive regarding effect duration these findings stand in stark contrast to correlational studies which tend to find large positive correlations between human capital interventions and entrepreneurial performance we therefore conclude that correlational studies tend to overestimate the benefits of human capital interventions moreover our estimates show that the interventions are associated with moderately low additionality

active labor market policy evaluations a meta analysis this article presents a meta analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies we categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007 job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective training programmes are associated with positive medium term impacts although in the short term they often appear ineffective we also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate

urban attributes and wage disparities in brazil a multilevel hierarchical model fontes g g simoes r f and hermeto camilo de oliveira a m urban attributes and wage disparities in brazil a multilevel hierarchical model regional studies this paper examines the effects of urban scale and productive structure on individual wage levels in brazilian cities and metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000 the estimation through hierarchical linear models enabled the inclusion of variables in different levels individual and urban and the decomposition of total wage variance the results showed significant and huge wage disparities among workers who share similar personal attributes but live in different regions of the country in addition the disparities persisted from 1990 to 2000 finally the results provided evidence that local economic and labour market factors played an important role in wage determination

behavioural additionality of r d subsidies a learning perspective the use of r d grants as a policy instrument has been motivated by economic arguments of market failure neo classical econometric studies have analysed the additionality of one euro of subsidies on both the investments of companies in the r d process and the output of that r d process more recently behavioural additionality has been launched as a third form of additionality in contrast to input and output additionality behavioural additionality is related to changes in the processes that take place within the firm in this paper we analyse the determinants of the behavioural additionality of r d grants to explain the mechanism through which behavioural additionality is obtained we use organizational learning theory as a guide to formulate our hypotheses hypotheses are tested using a telephone survey of 192 recipients of r d grants provided by the iwt in flanders in 2001 2004 matched to a sample of 84 firms that undertake innovation activities but which had never had a grant bid accepted we find that congenital learning and interorganizational learning lead to increased behavioural additionality however these learning effects decrease with the number of subsidized projects that are undertaken by the company

examining the formation of human capital in entrepreneurship a meta analysis of entrepreneurship education outcomes abstract effective human capital formation through the medium of entrepreneurship education and training eet is of increasing concern for governments as eet is growing rapidly across the world unfortunately there is a lack of consistent evidence showing that eet helps to create more or better entrepreneurs we undertake the first quantitative review of the literature and in the context of human capital theory find that there is indeed support for the value of eet based on 42 independent samples n 16 657 we find a significant relationship between eet and entrepreneurship related human capital assets r w 217 and entrepreneurship outcomes r w 159 the relationship between eet and entrepreneurship outcomes is stronger for academic focused eet interventions r w 238 than for training focused eet interventions r w 151 we find evidence of heterogeneity in many of our correlations and recommend that future studies examine potential moderators to more clearly delineate eet effect sizes we also find a number of methodological weaknesses among the studies analyzed and that those studies with lower methodological rigor are overstating the effect of eet recommendations to improve the quality of future work in the field are provided

the impact of an adult education voucher program evidence from a randomized field experiment abstract lifelong learning is often promoted in aging societies but little is known about its returns or governments ability to advance it this paper evaluates the effects of a large scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in switzerland we find no significant average effects of the voucher program on earnings employment and subsequent education 1 year after treatment but effects are heterogeneous low educated individuals are most likely to profit from adult education but least likely to use the voucher in addition the public voucher program appears to crowd out firm financed training the findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of untargeted voucher programs in promoting labor market outcomes through adult education

microenterprise development programs in the united states and in the developing world abstract sparked by examples from bangladesh bolivia indonesia and other developing countries hundreds of microenterprise programs have been started in the united states will these us efforts be successful this paper reviews the evidence and concludes that microenterprise development is much more difficult in the united states than in the developing world the paper suggests some ways to address the challenges of us microenterprise development