Are Young and Small Firms Hothouses for Nascent Entrepreneurs? Evidence from German Micro Data

By Joachim Wagner. Social Science Research Network, 2004

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using a large recent representative sample of the German population this paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing the hypothesis that young and small firms are hothouses for nascent entrepreneurs. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of becoming a nascent entrepreneur and the regional stratification of the sample into account. Controlling for various individual characteristics and attitudes (sex, age, risk aversion, presence of a role model in the family, and the width of professional background) we illustrate both the statistical significance and the economic importance for entrepreneurship of work experience in a firm that is both young and small.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4e8d28969cbbdf61e081e722c8cfec6fe37deca

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Citations in the corpus

The Economics of Entrepreneurship: What We Know and What We Don't (2005, background): “• Role models derived from working in small businesses (Wagner, 2004)”
Bureaucracy and Entrepreneurship: Workplace Effects on Entrepreneurial Entry (2007, background): “Wagner (2004), using a cross-sectional survey of the German population, found that people working for young and small firms were more likely to self-identify as being in the process of launching an entrepreneurial venture.”
Industry structure, entrepreneurship, and culture: An empirical analysis using historical coalfields (2016, background): “Often, because of the low division of labor, people in small firms are exposed to more fields of activity than people working in larger firms (e.g., Wagner, 2004; Hyytinen and Maliranta, 2008; Elfenbein et al., 2010).”
Do different institutional frameworks condition the influence of local fear of failure and entrepreneurial examples over entrepreneurial activity? (2007, background): “As in Wagner (2004), we consider that individuals involved in ‘start-up’ activities or who have recently launched a business (over the last 42 months) as being entrepreneurially active.”
Balanced skills among nascent entrepreneurs (2013, methodology): “As a proxy for prior work experience in young and small companies we use a dummy variable indicating whether the nascent entrepreneur had work experience in a company younger than 4 years and with less than 20 employees (Wagner 2004).”
Workplace Peers and Entrepreneurship (2010, unknown): “Second, we provide further evidence of the importance of the workplace in the entrepreneurial process (Freeman 1986, Burton et al. 2002, Wagner 2004, Dobrev and Barnett 2005, Gompers et al. 2005, Sørensen 2007a, Elfenbein et al. 2010, Parker 2009).”
Age and entrepreneurship: nuances from entrepreneur types and generation effects (2018, background): “This definition differs from what Wagner (2004) has defined, in that it does not consider whether the entrepreneurs have been actively trying to start a new firm in the previous year or use a positive monthly cash flow measure.”
Evolution on the Shoulders of Giants: Entrepreneurship and Firm Survival in the German Laser Industry (2007, background): “Wagner (2004) finds that employees of young and small firms are particularly likely to start new firms.”
Nascent entrepreneurship: empirical studies and developments (2005, methodology): “To a certain extent the present author shares Wagner’s limited enthusiasm for the person-factor research reported above, but mainly for different reasons.”