Identifying the effect of college education on business and employment survival

Andrea Asoni () and Tino Sanandaji
Additional contact information
Andrea Asoni: Charles River Associates

Small Business Economics, 2016, vol. 46, issue 2, No 8, 324 pages

Abstract: Abstract We use a multipronged identification strategy to estimate the effect of college education on business and employment survival. We account for the endogeneity of both education and business ownership with a competing risks duration model augmented with a college selection equation. We estimate the model jointly on the self-employed and salaried employees in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Unlike most previous studies, we find that college does not increase business survival. By contrast, a college degree significantly increases employment survival. Cognitive skills have a positive impact on survival for both the self-employed and employees. These findings suggest that college benefits the self-employed less than salaried, perhaps by generating skills more useful in employment than self-employment, or because of differences in the value of signaling.

Keywords: Business survival; Employment survival; College education; Cognitive skills; Locus of control; C41; J24; L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-015-9686-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Identifying the effect of college education on business and employment survival (2016)
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:46:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s11187-015-9686-5

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-015-9686-5

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 ().