Opportunity-motivated entrepreneurs’ growth expectations in Latin America and the moderating effect of education and exports

Antonio Lecuna

No 18, Serie Working Papers from Universidad del Desarrollo, School of Business and Economics

Abstract: Scholars have articulated a number of arguments regarding the beneficial effects of opportunity-motivated (as opposed to necessity-driven) entrepreneurs, and this study delves somewhat deeper into this topic. First, this study uses the expectation of job creation over five years as a metric to measure the benefits of entrepreneurship and employs this metric as a dependent variable defined as growth expectation. Second, this study utilizes a sample of 111,194 entrepreneurs to estimate how growth expectation is affected by the interaction between opportunity motivation and five entrepreneurial competencies: opportunity-alertness, self-efficacy, networking, risk-willingness, and education. Third, because the most significant interaction effect resulted from the interaction between opportunity-motivation and education, this combination is further explored with respect to the additional effect of three firm characteristics: operational phase, export orientation and innovation orientation. In the context of a relatively homogenous group of 19 Latin American countries, the results suggest that opportunity-motivated entrepreneurs’ numbers of years of schooling and an export-oriented firm provides added value and jointly boosts growth expectations, as reflected in expected increases in the number of employees

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; start-up; small business; innovation; growth expectation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2014-12, Revised 2014-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent and nep-ino
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dsr:wpaper:18

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