Are nascent entrepreneurs ‘Jacks-of-all-trades’? A test of Lazear's theory of entrepreneurship with German data

By Joachim Wagner. Social Science Research Network, 2006

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. The intuition behind this proposition is that entrepreneurs must have sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to put together the many ingredients needed for survival and success in a business, while for paid employees it suffices and pays to be a specialist in the field demanded by the job taken. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing Lazear's hypothesis using a large recent representative sample of the German population. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of becoming a nascent entrepreneur and the regional stratification of the sample into account. The results illustrate the statistical significance and economic importance of the ‘jack-of-all-trades’ theory.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd0e4256d7d4c07ef6673d33f60bcbf06ef7d14f

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Citations in the corpus

Exploring entrepreneurial skills and competencies in farm tourism (2012, background): “Moreover, the JAT view of entrepreneurship is supported by Wagner (2003, 2006) and Asteboro and Thompson (2011) who suggest that having a balanced skills mix stimulates entrepreneurship.”
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Gem) and Its Impact on Entrepreneurship Research (2013, methodology): “Wagner (2007) utilizes German Regional Entrepreneurship Monitor data and finds that fear of failure is a more”
Balanced skills among nascent entrepreneurs (2013, methodology): “This result concurs with empirical findings from Lazear and other scholars who reported associations between a balanced skill set and the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur (Lazear 2005; Wagner 2006; Silva 2007).”
Founders’ human capital and the performance of UK new technology based firms (2012, result): “This theory was also supported by the results of a number of studies (Wagner 2003, 2006), whereas other researchers (e.g. Astebro and Thompson 2007), although verifying that skill variety increases the probability of an individual becoming an entrepreneur and that it also contributes to higher…”
Individual Determinants of Self-Employment Entry – What Do We Really Know? (2013, unknown): “The main argument supporting this idea is that a background in a vast number of different roles enhances the skills and the capacity to perform well as selfemployed while the same is not necessary in the case of paid employment, in which it is specialization that is required and rewarded (Wagner, 20”
Who are the Microenterprise Owners? Evidence from Sri Lanka on Tokman v. De Soto (2008, unknown): “That mothers of the own account workers were more likely and the fathers were less likely to be self employed than for SME owners may suggest differences in income levels during childhood between these two groups.”