Social capital access and entrepreneurship

Stefan Bauernschuster, Oliver Falck and Stephan Heblich

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2010, vol. 76, issue 3, 821-833

Abstract: We investigate the effect of social capital access on entrepreneurship. Social capital helps entrepreneurs to overcome resource constraints. This is especially important in small communities where we often see a lack of market-oriented institutions such as venture capital firms. Entrepreneurs gain access to social capital via club memberships. Combining differences in the number of individual club memberships with differences in the importance of social capital across communities, we identify a causal small community mark-up effect of individual club memberships on entrepreneurship. Assuming that unobserved heterogeneity that might influence both the individual's selection into clubs and the occupational choice to be an entrepreneur is independent of community size, we find that the effect of club membership on the propensity to be an entrepreneur is 2.6 percentage points larger in small communities than in large communities. Robustness tests support the validity of our identifying assumption and results.

Keywords: Occupational; choice; Entrepreneurship; Social; capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-2681(10)00193-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Capital Access and Entrepreneurship (2010)
Working Paper: Social capital access and entrepreneurship (2010)
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:jeborg:v:76:y:2010:i:3:p:821-833

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().