chosen self-employment. Two questions are addressed using large scale labour force survey data for the UK. The first concerns … entrepreneurship on the basis of stated motivation, but with no evidence that being 'forced' into entrepreneurship through economic … necessity is a significant factor. Motivation towards entrepreneurship is therefore highly multidimensional. Multivariate …

The paper makes three contributions to the economics literature on entrepreneurship. We offer a new measure of … entrepreneurship which accounts for variations in persistence in self-employment and as a result avoids the weakness of approaches …

psychological disposition and environmental factors, as theory requires if optimism is to be a causal influence on entrepreneurship …