EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Entrepreneurial career paths: occupational context and the propensity to become self-employed

Alina Sorgner and Michael Fritsch ()

Small Business Economics, 2018, vol. 51, issue 1, No 6, 129-152

Abstract: Abstract We investigate the relationship between characteristics of an occupation-specific environment and the decision of employees to start an own business. A relatively high occupation-specific unemployment risk and high earnings risk are conducive to opt for self-employment. Also, occupations that are characterized by high self-employment rates foster entrepreneurial choice among their employees. The results suggest that career choices of future entrepreneurs are driven by different motivations than those of non-entrepreneurs. In particular, the expectation of a pronounced financial gain is critical for future entrepreneurs when they make their initial occupational choices in paid employment and it is also relevant for a self-employment choice. We find that when future entrepreneurs enter the labor market, they are more likely to choose occupations that require a relatively high variety of skills.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial choice; Occupation-specific determinants of entrepreneurship; Employment risk; Earnings risk; Skill variety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 J24 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-017-9917-z Abstract (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:51:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s11187-017-9917-z

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-017-9917-z

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-02
Handle: RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:51:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s11187-017-9917-z