Why Do Entrepreneurial Parents Have Entrepreneurial Children?

By Matthew J. Lindquist, Joeri Sol, M. van Praag. Journal of Labor Economics, 2012

436 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We explore the origins of the intergenerational association in entrepreneurship using Swedish adoption data that allow us to quantify the relative importance of prebirth and postbirth factors. We find that parental entrepreneurship increases the probability of children’s entrepreneurship by about 60%. For adoptees, both biological and adoptive parents make significant contributions to this association. These contributions, however, are quite different in size. Postbirth factors account for twice as much as prebirth factors in our decomposition of the intergenerational association in entrepreneurship. We investigate several candidate explanations for this large postbirth factor and present suggestive evidence in favor of role modeling.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/415929f83964150b095e2b380c75bab25b328ba9

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

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Citations in the corpus

Biology and Selection into Entrepreneurship—The Relevance of Prenatal Testosterone Exposure (2016, background): “…prenatal testosterone levels might be even more distant Role modeling and social identification is found to be especially strong for same sex relationships between parents and children (i.e., father–son and mother–daughter) (Lindquist et al., 2012; Ruef, Aldrich, & Carter, 2003; Sørensen, 2007).”
Biology and Management: A Review, Critique, and Research Agenda (2018, background): “, 1994), occupational status (Scarr & Weinberg, 1994), and entrepreneurial tendencies (Lindquist et al., 2015).”
The effect of early entrepreneurship education: Evidence from a field experiment (2014, background): “In the empirical literature there is some evidence of inter-generational transmission of entrepreneurial skills and occupational choice (Lindquist et al., 2014; Colombier and Masclet, 2008; Dunn and Holtz-Eakin, 2000).”
Entrepreneurial education, self-efficacy and intentions in Sub-Saharan Africa (2018, background): “The study controlled for gender (Karimi et al., 2014; Harris and Gibson, 2008), family background in entrepreneurship (Andersson and Hammarstedt, 2011; Lindquist et al., 2012), age (Gerba, 2012) and educational major or concentration (Maresch et al., 2016) as they can impact on EI (Figure 1).”
The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education in High School on Long-Term Entrepreneurial Performance (2015, background): “It is important to include this variable since parental entrepreneurship is one of the strongest determinants of entrepreneurship (e.g. Andersson and Hammarstedt 2010, 2011; Lindquist et al. 2012).”
Running in the family: parental role models in entrepreneurship (2014, methodology): “Third, if parents make gender-specific investments in their childrens’ human capital, in the sense that boys tend to work in their fathers’ firms, while girls work in their mothers’ firms, this may give rise to observed gender-specific effects as predicted by the same-sex hypothesis above but driven”