Are Education and Entrepreneurial Income Endogenous and do Family Background Variables make Sense as Instruments? A Bayesian Analysis

Education is a well-known driver of (entrepreneurial) income. The measurement of its influence, however, suffers from endogeneity suspicion. For instance, ability and occupational choice are mentioned as driving both the level of (entrepreneurial) income and of education. Using instrumental variables can provide a way out. However, three questions remain: whether endogeneity is really present, whether it matters and whether the selected instruments make sense. Using Bayesian methods, we find that the relationship between education and entrepreneurial income is indeed endogenous and that the impact of endogeneity on the estimated relationship between educa-tion and income is sizeable. We do so using family background variables and show that relaxing the strict validity assumption of these instruments does not lead to strongly different results. This is an important finding because family background variables are generally strongly correlated with education and are available in most datasets. Our approach is applicable beyond the field of returns to education for income. It applies wherever endogeneity suspicion arises and the three questions become relevant

Education and Entrepreneurial Choice: An Instrumental Variables Analysis

Education is argued to be an important driver of the decision to start a business. The measurement of its influence, however, is difficult since it is considered to be an endogenous variable. This study accounts for this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approachand a data set of more than ten thousand individuals from 27 European countries and the US. Theeffect of education on the decision to become self-employed is found to be strongly positive,much higher than the estimated effect in case no instrumental variables are used. That is, thehigher the respondent's level of education, the greater the likelihood that he/she starts a business.Implications for entrepreneurship research and practice are discussed

Digital Entrepreneurship: What is New if Anything?

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The Schumpeterian Entrepreneur: A Review of the Empirical Evidence on the Antecedents, Behavior, and Consequences of Innovative Entrepreneurship

Innovative entrepreneurship is considered an important pillar for economic development and has sparked a lively discussion in academia and practice alike. Oftentimes, however, the debate is not sufficiently grounded on solid empirical evidence. The academic literature is growing but very scattered and is separated into several disciplines. We provide a summary that takes stock of the academic knowledge about innovative entrepreneurship and summarizes the evidence from 102 empirical studies published in the primary economics and management journals on the antecedents, behavior, and consequences of innovative entrepreneurship. Based on this state-of-the-art literature review, directions for future research are discussed

Social capital of venture capitalists and start-up funding

How does the social capital of venture capitalists (VCs) affect the funding of start-ups? By building on the rich social capital literature, we hypothesize a positive effect of VCs' social capital, derived from past syndication, on the amount of money that start-ups receive. Specifically, we argue that both structural and relational aspects of VCs' social networks provide VCs with superior access to information about current investment objects and opportunities to leverage them in the future, increasing their willingness to invest in these firms. Our empirical results, derived from a novel dataset containing more than 1,500 first funding rounds in the Internet and IT sector, strongly confirm our hypotheses. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of venture capital and entrepreneurship, showing that the role and effect of VCs' social capital on start-up firms may be more complex than previously argued in the literature

Are CEOs in Family Firms Paid Like Bureaucrats? Evidence from Bayesian and Frequentist Analyses

The relationship between CEO pay and performance has been much analyzed in the management and economics literature. This study analyzes the structure of executive compensation in family and non-family firms. In line with predictions of agency theory, it is found that the share of base salary is higher with family-member CEOs than it is with nonfamily member CEOs. Furthermore, family-member CEOs receive a lower share of option pay. The paper's findings have implications for family business research and the executive compensation literature. To make the findings robust, the statistical analysis is performed with both Bayesian and classical frequentist methods