Personality characteristics and the decisions to become and stay self-employed

Marco Caliendo, Frank Fossen and Alexander Kritikos

Small Business Economics, 2014, vol. 42, issue 4, 787-814

Abstract: Based on a large, representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent the personality of individuals influences the entry decision into and the exit decision from self-employment. We reveal that some traits, such as openness to experience, extraversion, and risk tolerance affect entry, but different ones, such as agreeableness or different parameter values of risk tolerance, affect exit from self-employment. Only locus of control has a similar influence on the entry and exit decisions. The explanatory power of all observed traits among all observable variables amounts to 30 %, with risk tolerance, locus of control, and openness having the highest explanatory power. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Personality; Big five; Risk tolerance; Locus of control; D81; J23; M13; L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (255)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11187-013-9514-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Personality Characteristics and the Decision to Become and Stay Self-Employed (2011)
Working Paper: Personality Characteristics and the Decision to Become and Stay Self-Employed (2011)
Working Paper: Personality Characteristics and the Decision to Become and Stay Self-Employed (2011)
Working Paper: Personality characteristics and the decision to become and stay self-employed (2011)
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:42:y:2014:i:4:p:787-814

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-013-9514-8

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 ().