Are Nascent Entrepreneurs Jacks-of-All-Trades? A Test of Lazear's Theory of Entrepreneurship with German Data

Arbeitspapier

In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the jack-of-all-trades view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. The intuition behind this proposition is that entrepreneurs must have sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to put together the many ingredients needed for survival and success in a business, while for paid employees it suffices and pays to be a specialist in the field demanded by the job taken. This paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing Lazear's hypothesis using a large recent representative sample of the German population. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of becoming a nascent entrepreneur and the regional stratification of the sample into account. The results illustrate the statistical significance and economic importance of the jack-of-all-trades theory.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 911

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity ; Labor Demand
• Thema: entrepreneurship ; jack-of-all-trades theory ; rare events logit ; Germany ; Unternehmer ; Selbständige ; Persönlichkeitspsychologie ; Schätzung ; Deutschland

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Wagner, Joachim
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
• (wo): Bonn
• (wann): 2003

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/20147
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:44 MEZ