When unemployed persons go into business, they often are characterized as necessity entrepreneurs, because push factors, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. In contrast to this, business founders who have been previously employed represent opportunity entrepreneurs because...

In response to strong revenue and income losses that a large share of the self-employed faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a 50bn emergency aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the impact...

The influence of risk aversion on the decision to become self-employed is a much discussed topic in the entrepreneurial literature. Conventional wisdom asserts that the role model of an entrepreneur requires to make risky decisions in uncertain environments and hence that more risk-averse...

Risk attitudes have an impact on not only the decision to become an entrepreneur but also the survival and failure rates of entrepreneurs. Whereas recent research underpins the theoretical proposition of a positive correlation between risk attitudes and the decision to become an entrepreneur,...