Entrepreneurial spillovers across coworkers

Melanie Wallskog

Journal of Financial Economics, 2025, vol. 170, issue C

Abstract: How do workplace social connections shape everyday entrepreneurship? Using comprehensive data on millions of American workers across the economy, I find three key patterns. First, entrepreneurial coworkers inspire and teach entrepreneurship: individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs after working with coworkers who previously led young businesses. Second, these effects predominantly occur within demographic groups, perpetuating lower entrepreneurship rates for women and Black Americans. Third, these workplace spillovers can increase productivity: individuals exposed to relatively successful coworkers subsequently run successful companies too.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurial Finance; Labor and Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 J22 L26 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X25000856
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jfinec:v:170:y:2025:i:c:s0304405x25000856

DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2025.104077

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Financial Economics is currently edited by G. William Schwert

More articles in Journal of Financial Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().