Are entrepreneurship and cognitive skills related? Some international evidence

Rik Hafer () and Garett Jones

Small Business Economics, 2015, vol. 44, issue 2, 283-298

Abstract: Do national differences in cognitive skills (CS) predict a nation’s likelihood of generating high-quality entrepreneurs who create and expand high-value businesses? We answer this question by estimating cross-country regressions that use the Acs and Szerb Global Entrepreneurship Development Index (GEDI) and a measure of national CS. After including conventional controls we find for a sample of 60 countries that our measure of CS robustly predicts the GEDI (unconditional correlation = 0.65, standardized beta = 0.42), an index that gives weight to both entrepreneurial attitudes within a nation and the institutional and economic prerequisites for creating high-value, high-growth firms. We find that this result also holds for an alternative measure of entrepreneurship. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Cognitive skills; Economic freedom; A1; F2; K00; M2; L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:44:y:2015:i:2:p:283-298

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DOI: 10.1007/s11187-014-9596-y

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