Serial entrepreneurship, learning by doing and self-selection

Vera Rocha, Anabela Carneiro and Celeste Varum

CEF.UP Working Papers from Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto

Abstract: It remains a question whether serial entrepreneurs typically perform better than their novice counterparts owing to learning by doing e¤ects or mostly because they are a selected sample of higher-than-average ability entrepreneurs. This paper tries to unravel these two effects by exploring a novel empirical strategy based on continuous time duration models with selection. We use a large longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset that allows us to track almost 220,000 individuals who have left their first entrepreneurial experience. Over 35,000 serial entrepreneurs are identified and followed in their second business, in order to evaluate how entrepreneurial experience acquired in the previous business improves persistence by reducing their exit rates. Our results show that serial entrepreneurs are not a random selection of ex-business-owners. The positive association found between prior experience and serial entrepreneurs' survival is mainly due to selection on ability, rather than the result of learning by doing.

Keywords: Serial Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurial Experience; Learning; Selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 J24 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ent and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://cefup.fep.up.pt/uploads/WorkingPapers/wp1312.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://cefup.fep.up.pt/uploads/WorkingPapers/wp1312.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://cefup.fep.up.pt/uploads/WorkingPapers/wp1312.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Serial entrepreneurship, learning by doing and self-selection (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:por:cetedp:1312

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEF.UP Working Papers from Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ana Bonanca ().