Demographics and Entrepreneurship

By James Liang, Hui Wang, Edward P. Lazear. Journal of Political Economy, 2014

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Entrepreneurship requires energy and creativity as well as business acumen. Some factors that contribute to entrepreneurship decline with age, but business skills increase with experience in high-level positions. Having too many older workers in society slows entrepreneurship. When older workers occupy key positions, they block younger workers from acquiring skills. A theory is formulated and tested using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data. A one standard deviation decrease in a country’s median age increases new business formation by 2.5 percentage points, which is about 40 percent of the mean rate. Furthermore, older societies have lower rates of entrepreneurship at every age.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a4580e549ca22f879b14ae628617907b2d68889

Citations in the corpus

• Demographic Structure and Macroeconomic Trends (2019, unknown): “…from the literature of demographics and productivity and innovation (see Jones (2010) and Feyrer (2008)) and demographics and entrepreneurship (see Liang, Wang, and Lazear (2014)), young and middle age workers are relatively more important in the innovation process relative to other age groups.”
• Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs: A Review of Recent Literature (2018, unknown): “15 Examples of work in this literature include Bates (1995), Cowling (2000), Reynolds et al. (2002), Blanchflower and Oswald (2009), Parker (2009), Bönte et al. (2009), and Liang et al. (2014).”