What makes the entrepreneurial personality is the key question we seek to answer in thespecial issue of the Journal of Economic Psychology on “Personality and Entrepreneurship”.The contributions are clustered around questions regarding the linkage between personality,socio-economic factors...

Do academic scientists bring valuable human capital to the companies they found or join? If so, what are the particular skills that compose their human capital and how are these skills related to firm performance? This paper examines these questions using a particular group of academic...

Despite lower incomes, the self-employed consistently report higher satisfaction with theirjobs. But are self-employed individuals also happier, more satised with their lives as awhole? High job satisfaction might cause them to neglect other important domains of life,such that the fullling job...

We develop entrepreneurship and institutional theory to explain variation in different types ofentrepreneurship across individuals and institutional contexts. Our framework generateshypotheses about the negative impact of higher levels of corruption, weaker property rightsand especially...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, thereis hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ thoseworkers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory ofskill-biased change in...

We analyze empirically the effects of urban agglomeration on Italian college graduates’ workpossibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that each 100,000inhabitant-increase in the size of the individual’s province of work reduces the chances ofbeing an entrepreneur...

How valuable is education for entrepreneurs’ performance as compared to employees’?What might explain any differences? And does education affect peoples’ occupationalchoices accordingly? We answer these questions based on a large panel of US labor forceparticipants. We show that education...

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model.The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment ofand accruals from assets, such as human capital. The second observation is thatentrepreneurs enjoy higher returns to...

This paper estimates an unobserved components model to explore the macro dynamics ofentrepreneurship in Spain and the US. We ask whether entrepreneurship exhibits hysteresis,defined as a macro dynamic structure in which cyclical fluctuations have persistent effects onthe natural rate of...

The link between measured risk aversion and the decision to become an entrepreneur iswell established, but the link between risk preferences and entrepreneurial success is not.Standard theoretical models of occupational choice under uncertainty imply a positivecorrelation between an...