The impact of habitual entrepreneurial experience on new firm closure outcomes

Sandra Gottschalk (), Francis J. Greene () and Bettina Müller
Additional contact information
Sandra Gottschalk: Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW)
Francis J. Greene: University of Birmingham

Small Business Economics, 2017, vol. 48, issue 2, No 4, 303-321

Abstract: Abstract In this paper, we argue that it is difficult for habitual entrepreneurs to use their experiential knowledge to develop a more viable new firm than novice entrepreneurs. Hindered by the difficulty of disentangling how actions lead to outcomes in low predictive environments such as new firm settings; hampered by the novelty and uncertainty of new firm closure; and misguided by subjective beliefs about their ability, we contend that habitual entrepreneurs close their new firm just as quickly as novice entrepreneurs and are just as likely to go bankrupt. Using large-scale panel data that track new firm closure amongst 7400 new German firms, we find that the new firms run by habitual entrepreneurs close just as quickly as those run by novice entrepreneurs. We also find that habituals are just as likely as novices to see their new business go bankrupt.

Keywords: Habitual entrepreneurs; Novice entrepreneurs; Firm closure; Panel data; L26; L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-016-9780-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:sbusec:v:48:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s11187-016-9780-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-016-9780-3

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().