The Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: Not Just a Matter of Personality

Marco Caliendo, Frank Fossen, Alexander Kritikos and Miriam Wetter

No 4803, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Why do entrepreneurship rates differ so markedly by gender? Using data from a large, representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent personality traits, human capital, and the employment history influence the start-up decision and can explain the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Applying a decomposition analysis, we observe that the higher risk aversion among women explains a large share of the entrepreneurial gender gap. We also find an education effect contributing to the gender difference. In contrast, the Big Five model and the current employment state have effects in the opposite direction, meaning that the gender gap in entrepreneurial entry would be even larger if women had the same scores and the same employment status as men.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; gender gap; personality; decomposition analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 J16 J24 L26 M13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp4803.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: Not just a Matter of Personality (2015)
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:ces:ceswps:_4803

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().