Entrepreneurial skills and workers’ wages in small firms

Rui Baptista (), Francisco Lima and Miguel Preto

Small Business Economics, 2013, vol. 40, issue 2, 309-323

Abstract: This paper contributes to the understanding of how small firms are organized and managed. It tests an entrepreneur-worker matching model in small entrepreneurial firms. The model contemplates the existence of complementarities between workers’ and entrepreneur’s skills. Using a Portuguese longitudinal matched employer–employee dataset for the period 1995–2003, the empirical analysis provides descriptive results consistent with the matching model: skill stratification—entrepreneurs are more skilled than workers; scale effects—more skilled entrepreneurs run larger firms, though limited by the restriction on firm size; and positive sorting—more skilled entrepreneurs matched with more skilled workers. The estimation of wage regressions shows that the higher the level of education and experience of the entrepreneur, the higher the wage premium for workers. Results suggest that workers’ wages reflect the value of the match with entrepreneur’s skills. Thus, entrepreneurial skills have an impact not only on job creation, but also on the quality of jobs created. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Matching; Positive sorting; Small firms; Wages; L26; J24; J31; M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11187-012-9463-7 (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:40:y:2013:i:2:p:309-323

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-012-9463-7

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 ().