Successful Entrepreneurs Come From the Top of the Earned Income Distribution

Niklas Garnadt, Lena Füner, Konrad Stahl, Joacim Tag and Konrad O. Stahl

No 11978, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Identifying high growth startups ex-ante and fostering their success is an important policy challenge. Using Swedish registry data, we show that previous labor market earnings of entrepreneurs is a simple observable that is strongly correlated with entrepreneurship success. Entrepreneurs from the top decile of income from dependent employment are four times more likely to succeed than those from the lowest decile. Their firms are larger and more productive from the outset, and this effect intensifies over time. This correlation is virtually unaffected by variations in the entrepreneurs' personal traits. It does also not vary across the business cycle.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; high-growth startups; labor income; unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 L26 M13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11978.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ces:ceswps:_11978

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().