Lifting the Iron Curtain: School-Age Education and Entrepreneurial Intentions

Oliver Falck, Robert Gold and Stephan Heblich ()
Additional contact information
Stephan Heblich: University of Toronto

No 9373, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We exploit Germany's reunification to identify how school-age education affects entrepreneurial intentions. We look at university students in reunified Germany who were born before the Iron Curtain fell. During school age, all students in the West German control group received formal and informal education in a free-market economy, while East German students did or did not receive free-market education. Difference-in-differences estimations show that school-age education in a free-market economy increases entrepreneurial intentions. An event study supports the common-trends assumption. Results remain robust in matched samples and when we exploit within-student variation in occupational intentions to control for unobserved individual characteristics.

Keywords: formal education; socialism; entrepreneurship; informal education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 L26 P30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-edu, nep-ent, nep-ino and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Geography, 2017, 17 (5), 1111–1148,

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9373.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Lifting the iron curtain: school-age education and entrepreneurial intentions (2017)
Working Paper: Lifting the Iron Curtain: School-age Education and Entrepreneurial Intentions (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9373

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().