Families, Human Capital, and Small Business: Evidence from the Characteristics of Business Owners Survey

By R. Fairlie, Alicia Robb. Social Science Research Network, 2005

385 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent research has concluded that the children of business owners are substantially more likely than others to become self-employed themselves. The authors of this study find that more than half of business owners in the confidential, restricted-access 1992 Characteristics of Business Owners Survey had a self-employed family member before starting their business. Of the group with a self-employed family member, fewer than half had worked in that family member's business, suggesting that the intergenerational link in self-employment is not primarily due to the acquisition of general and specific business human capital. In contrast, the success of small businesses owned by those surveyed was only weakly correlated with having a self-employed family member, but strongly correlated with prior work experience in a family member's business, which is one method of acquiring general and specific business human capital. Another finding is that only 1.6% of the small businesses surveyed were inherited.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/158b7b47f9abb289137a044da89126e0c2f291a3

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Citations in the corpus

Entrepreneurial potential: The role of human and cultural capitals (2014, background): “Perhaps more importantly, early experience in a family business is correlated significantly with later entrepreneurial success (Aldrich and Yang, 2012; Fairlie and Robb, 2007).”
Impact of founder experience on exit intentions (2012, background): “Significant positive relationships between extent of formal education and firm economic performance found by Gimeno et al. (1997), Fairlie and Robb (2007) , and Robinson and Sexton (1994) suggest that those with less education will have less successful firms.”
Running in the family: parental role models in entrepreneurship (2014, background): “Lentz and Laband (1983, 1990), Hout (1984), Hout and Rosen (2000), Dunn and Holtz-Eakin (2000), Fairlie and Robb (2007) and Laspita et al.”
Why Do Entrepreneurial Parents Have Entrepreneurial Children? (2012, background): “Fairlie and Robb ð2007Þ find that having self-employed parents increases profits and sales, and lowers closure, but only when the entrepreneur has work experience in the family business.”
Disentangling the effect of prior entrepreneurial exposure on entrepreneurial intention (2012, background): “This approach is problematic as both types of exposure may provide individuals with different learning experiences (Chlosta et al., 2012; Fairlie & Robb, 2007).”
The effect of early entrepreneurship education: Evidence from a field experiment (2014, background): “For instance, the paper by Hamilton et al. (2003), that studies the effect of teamwork 40 von Graevenitz et al. (2010) develop a formal Bayesian updating model to explain the mixed findings on entrepreneurial intentions and predict that program participation causes a sorting effect among students…”
The Impact of Innovation on the Performance of Small and Medium Manufacturing Enterprises: Evidence from Malaysia (2013, background): “They were the level of owner’s education (Nichter and Goldmark, 2009; Fairlie and Robb, 2007; Mengistae, 2006), owner’s business experience (Mengistae, 2006; Alowaihan, 2004), firm age (Birley and Westhead, 1990) and firm size (Ozgulbas et al.”
Social capital access and entrepreneurship (2010, background): “…entrepreneurial abilities include a person’s risk aversion (Fairlie, 2002; Kihlstrom and Laffont, 1979; Cramer et al., 2002) and education (Falck et al., forthcoming; Lazear, 2005), but also practical experience (Fairlie and Robb, 2007) and genetic factors (Nicolaou et al., 2008) play a major role.”
The Impact of the Family Background on Students’ Entrepreneurial Intentions: An Empirical Analysis (2020, background): “…from entrepreneurial families are more likely than those without a similar background to have access to the human, financial, and social capital [22,24,27,43], and to learn techniques taught at universities, such as business planning or market analysis [29], their requirements for additional…”
Demographic factors, family background and prior self-employment on entrepreneurial intention - Vietnamese business students are different: why? (2018, background): “Similarly, Fairlie and Robb (2007) showed that entrepreneurs tended to have a self-employed mother or father in their family history.”
The value of an educated population for an individual's entrepreneurship success (2014, background): “8 formance and incomes of entrepreneurs (see for instance, Bates, 1990; Burke et al., 2000; Cooper et al., 1994; Davidsson and Honig, 2003; Fairlie and Robb, 2007; Henley, 2005; Millán et al., 2013a; Robinson and Sexton, 1994 and Van Praag et al., 2013, as well as the meta-analyses of Unger et al., ”
Entrepreneurship and role models (2012, background): “…it is acknowledged that genetic heritage (Nicolaou et al. 2008), the actual possibilities for learning on the job provided by a family business (Fairlie and Robb, 2007), or financial support (Georgellis et al. 2005) may also underlie the observed association between the choice for…”
Entrepreneurship Education and Training Programs around the World: Dimensions for Success (2014, positive): “However, Farstad (2002) warns of the danger of over-relying on such methods for learning entrepreneurship concepts, describing how students tend to focus on copying the business plans of other students to ensure good grades. EESE program evaluations and research also identify instructors as exposing”