Personality Traits and the Evaluation of Start-Up Subsidies

Marco Caliendo, Steffen Künn () and Martin Weißenberger ()
Additional contact information
Martin Weißenberger: University of Potsdam

No 9628, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Many countries support business start-ups to spur economic growth and reduce unemployment with different programmes. Evaluation studies of such programmes commonly rely on the conditional independence assumption (CIA), allowing a causal interpretation of the results only if all relevant variables affecting participation and success are accounted for. While the entrepreneurship literature has emphasised the important role of personality traits as predictors for start-up decisions and business success, these variables were neglected in evaluation studies so far due to data limitations. In this paper, we evaluate a new start-up subsidy for unemployed individuals in Germany using propensity score matching under the CIA. Having access to rich administrative-survey data allows us to incorporate usually unobserved personality measures in the evaluation and investigate their impact on the estimated effects. We find strong positive effects on labour market reintegration and earned income for the new programme. Most importantly, results including and excluding individuals' personalities do not differ significantly, implying that concerns about potential overestimation of programme effects in absence of personality measures might be less justified if the set of other control variables is rich enough.

Keywords: treatment effects; personality; self-employment; evaluation; start-up subsidies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 H43 J68 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-lab, nep-ltv and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Published - published in: European Economic Review, 2016, 86, 87-108

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9628.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Personality traits and the evaluation of start-up subsidies (2016)
Working Paper: Personality Traits and the Evaluation of Start-Up Subsidies (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:iza:izadps:dp9628

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().