Born entrepreneur? Adolescents' personality characteristics and self-employment in adulthood

Jutta Viinikainen, Guido Heineck, Petri Böckerman (), Mirka Hintsanen, Olli Raitakari and Jaakko Pehkonen

No 108, BERG Working Paper Series from Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group

Abstract: Is there an entrepreneurial personality and does it appear early in life? We provide a new answer on this question by using the so-called Type A behavior traits (Aggression, Leadership, Responsibility, and Eagerness-Energy), measured in childhood and adolescence, and examining their relationship to self-employment propensity in adulthood. Using data from the Young Finns Study linked to the Finnish Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data and the Longitudinal Population Census of Statistics, our results show that the early-life Leadership-dimension is significantly associated with a higher likelihood 1) of becoming self-employed later in life and 2) of being more successful as an entrepreneur, as approximated by sales. Our results also reinforce the prior evidence on the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship.

Keywords: Type A behavior; personality; self-employment; entrepreneurship; intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/129616/1/852490895.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Born Entrepreneur? Adolescents' Personality Characteristics and Self-Employment in Adulthood (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:zbw:bamber:108

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BERG Working Paper Series from Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().