Using 1989 to 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances data, this paper addresses three questions: 1) Are business owners generally more or less financially conservative than their non-business-owning counterparts?; 2) Do business owners accumulate more wealth?; and, 3) Do business owners hold a smaller...

Many scholars see entrepreneurs as action-oriented individuals who use rules of thumb and other mental heuristics to make decisions, but who do little systematic planning and analysis. We argue that what distinguishes successful from unsuccessful entrepreneurs is precisely that the former vary...

This paper presents an entrepreneurial optimal business plan in which optimal consumption and portfolio rules, and optimal exit strategy for an entrepreneur are jointly determined in the presence of undiversifiable idiosyncratic risk. We find that the entrepreneur is more likely to exit from her...