Intrapreneurship or Entrepreneurship?

I explore the factors that determine whether new business opportunities are exploited by starting a new venture for an employer ('nascent intrapreneurship') or independently ('nascent entrepreneurship'). Analysis of a nationally representative sample of American adults gathered in 2005-06 uncovers systematic differences between the drivers of nascent entrepreneurship and nascent intrapreneurship. Nascent entrepreneurs tend to leverage their general human capital and social ties to organize ventures which sell directly to customers, whereas intrapreneurs disproportionately commercialize unique new opportunities which sell to other businesses. Implications of the findings are discussed.nascent entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, sample selection

Transitions to Entrepreneurship and Industry-Specific Barriers

Drivers of entrepreneurial entry are investigated in this study by examining how entry into small-business ownership is shaped by industry-specific constraints. The human- and financial-capital endowments of potential entrepreneurs entering firms in various industries are shown to differ profoundly, depending on the type of venture entered. The educational credentials of highly educated potential entrepreneurs, in particular, predict avoidance of small-firm ownership in some industries as well as attraction to others. Recognizing that individuals choose an industry sector jointly with their decision to enter entrepreneurship, we find that the conventional practice of conflating different industry types in empirical analyses of transitions to entrepreneurship generates misleading findings about the determinants of entrepreneurship.entrepreneurship, self-employment, capital constraints, transitions, entry barriers, business start-ups

Editorial: On submitting economics articles to JBV

Non peer reviewedPostprin

An intergenerational theory of the consumption function

This thesis presents a theory of the consumption function called the 'Inter- Generational Hypothesis' (IGH). The theory starts from the premise that individuals derive utility not only from their own consumption, but also from the welfare of their offspring. Individuals are supposed to maximise an intergenerationally altruistic utility function subject to a lifetime budget constraint and so derive their optimal consumption and bequest plans. From these plans, it is possible to construct an individual's consumption function. This contains earnings and inheritance terms, and is non-linear in earnings; this is consistently aggregated over all living individuals to yield the aggregate IGH consumption function. A feature of this function is the rich set of intergenerational information hypotheses it is able to encompass; there are also several implications with respect to earnings redistribution policy. The IGH function is estimated using 23 years of post-war UK data, and tested against rival consumption models, including Hall's (1978) REPIH. The principal finding is that the data do not appear to be consistent with either model in their pure form; however, they support a hybrid consumption function where a proportion of the population behave according to the altruistic IGH, and where the rest behave according to the 'selfish' REPIH. An additional finding, necessarily tentative given the imperfections of the distributional data, is a failure to detect significant non-linearity in the aggregate consumption function. This result casts doubt on the usefulness of policies designed to redistribute incomes in order to affect aggregate consumption

The Dynamics of Entrepreneurship: Hysteresis, Business Cycles and Government Policy

This paper estimates an unobserved components model to explore the macro dynamics of entrepreneurship in Spain and the US. We ask whether entrepreneurship exhibits hysteresis, defined as a macro dynamic structure in which cyclical fluctuations have persistent effects on the natural rate of entrepreneurship. We find evidence of hysteresis in Spain, but not the US, while in both countries business cycle output variations significantly affect future rates of entrepreneurship. The article discusses implications of the findings for the design of entrepreneurship policies.hysteresis, unobserved components model, time series models, business cycles, self-employment, entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurial Homeworkers

Open Access via Springer Compact Agreement.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Testing for Hysteresis in Entrepreneurship in 23 OECD Countries

We explore the macro structure of entrepreneurship rates in a panel of 23 OECD countries over 1972-2006. We find that rates of entrepreneurship in OECD’s countries exhibit persistence rather than hysteresis. Implications for the design of entrepreneurship policies are discussed

The Dynamics of Entrepreneurship: Hysteresis, Business Cycles and Government Policy

This paper estimates an unobserved components model to explore the macro dynamics of entrepreneurship in Spain and the US. We ask whether entrepreneurship exhibits hysteresis, defined as a macro dynamic structure in which business cycle fluctuations have persistent effects on the natural rate of entrepreneurship. We find evidence of hysteresis in Spain, but not the US, while in both countries business cycle output variations significantly affect future rates of entrepreneurship. The article discusses implications of the findings for the design of entrepreneurship policies

Ability Dispersion and Team Performance: a field experiment

This paper studies the impact of diversity in cognitive ability among members of a team on their performance. We conduct a large field experiment in which teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. Exogenous variation in - otherwise random - team composition is imposed by assigning individuals to teams based on their measured cognitive abilities. The setting is one of business management practices in the longer run where tasks are diverse and involve complex decision-making. We propose a model in which greater ability dispersion generates greater knowledge for a team, but also increases the costs of monitoring necessitated by moral hazard. Consistent with the predictions of our model, we find that team performance as measured in terms of sales, profits and profits per share first increases, and then decreases, with ability dispersion. Teams with a moderate degree of ability dispersion also experience fewer dismissals due to fewer shirking members in those teams