Can Unemployment Insurance Spur Entrepreneurial Activity?

Johan Hombert, Antoinette Schoar, David Sraer and David Thesmar

No 20717, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study a large-scale French reform that provided generous downside insurance for unemployed individuals starting a business. We study whether this reform affects the composition of people who are drawn into entrepreneurship. New firms started in response to the reform are, on average, smaller, but have similar growth expectations and education levels compared to start-ups before the reform. They are also as likely to survive or to hire. In aggregate, the effect of the reform on employment is largely offset by large crowd-out effects. However, because new firms are more productive, the reform has the impact of raising aggregate productivity. These results suggest that the dispersion of entrepreneurial abilities is small in the data, so that the facilitation of entry leads to sizable Schumpeterian dynamics at the firm-level.

JEL-codes: G3 H25 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-ias, nep-lab and nep-sbm
Note: CF
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

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Working Paper: Can Unemployment Insurance Spur Entrepreneurial Activity? (2014)
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