Is Entrepreneurial Success Predictable? An Ex-Ante Analysis of the Character-Based Approach

Marco Caliendo () and Alexander Kritikos
Additional contact information
Marco Caliendo: http://www.iza.org

No 1, Working Papers from Hanseatic University, Germany, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which focuses on the personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction of entrepreneurial success. A unique data set is used consisting of 414 persons whose personal characteristics were analyzed by different methods, namely an one-day assessment center (AC) and a standardized questionnaire, before they launched their business. Results are partly unexpected and weaker than previous ex-post findings: first, we found correlations between the AC data and the questionnaire in one subgroup only. Second, the predictive power of the AC data is slightly better than that of the questionnaire, but lower than expected in theory. Interestingly, for those subgroups where the AC data have low predictive power, the questionnaire does better. Third, when success is measured in terms of employees hired, the character-based approach is a poor predictor.

Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-ent
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://212.204.40.50/econ/RePEc/pdf/phu_dp_001.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server 212.204.40.50: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

Related works:
Journal Article: Is Entrepreneurial Success Predictable? An Ex‐Ante Analysis of the Character‐Based Approach (2008)
Working Paper: Is Entrepreneurial Success Predictable?: An Ex-ante Analysis of the Character-Based Approach (2007)
Working Paper: Is Entrepreneurial Success Predictable? An Ex-Ante Analysis of the Character-Based Approach (2007)
Working Paper: Is entrepreneurial success predictable? An ex-ante analysis of the character-based approach (2007)
Working Paper: Is Entrepreneurial Success Predictable? An Ex-Ante Analysis of the Character-Based Approach (2006)
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:phu:wpaper:001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Hanseatic University, Germany, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Frank Waldau ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).