Are Nascent Entrepreneurs Jacks-of-All-Trades? A Test of Lazear's Theory of Entrepreneurship with German Data

Joachim Wagner ()

No 911, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the jack-of-all-trades view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. The intuition behind this proposition is that entrepreneurs must have sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to put together the many ingredients needed for survival and success in a business, while for paid employees it suffices and pays to be a specialist in the field demanded by the job taken. This paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing Lazear's hypothesis using a large recent representative sample of the German population. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of becoming a nascent entrepreneur and the regional stratification of the sample into account. The results illustrate the statistical significance and economic importance of the jack-of-all-trades theory.

Keywords: rare events logit; Germany; jack-of-all-trades theory; entrepreneurship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2003-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-geo and nep-mfd
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published - published in: Applied Economics, 2006, 38 (20), 2415-2419

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Journal Article: Are nascent entrepreneurs 'Jacks-of-all-trades'? A test of Lazear's theory of entrepreneurship with German data (2006)
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