Behind the Gate Experiment: Evidence on Effects of and Rationales for Subsidized Entrepreneurship Training

By R. Fairlie, Dean S. Karlan, Jonathan Zinman. Social Science Research Network, 2015

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States, we find no strong or lasting effects on those most likely to face credit or human capital constraints, or labor market discrimination. We do find a short-run effect on business ownership for those unemployed at baseline, but this dissipates at longer horizons. Treatment effects on the full sample are also short-term and limited in scope: we do not find effects on business sales, earnings, or employees.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e1e57137929acf1cb0dbf7b0f036d24c3896c4b2

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Citations in the corpus

Entrepreneurship Education and Entry into Self-Employment Among University Graduates (2016, background): “These results suggest a substitution from wage employment to selfemployment, similar to findings in Fairlie et al. (2015) in the U.S.”
Can Basic Entrepreneurship Transform the Economic Lives of the Poor? (2013, background): “…disappointing performance of shortterm training for existing microentrepreneurs, which have generally been found ine ective at increasing pro ts and business growth [Field et al. 2010, Drexler et al. 2010, Karlan and Valdivia 2011, Fairlie et al. 2012, Bruhn et al. 2012, McKenzie and Woodru 2012].”
The effect of early entrepreneurship education: Evidence from a field experiment (2014, background): “4 Recent studies by Karlan and Valdivia (2011) and Fairlie et al. (2012), using randomized experimental designs, report mixed results on the impact of entrepreneurship training for entrepreneurs. Karlan and Valdivia (2011) find positive effects on business knowledge.”
The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education in High School on Long-Term Entrepreneurial Performance (2015, background): “The goals of most such efforts are to increase the rate and quality of firms started (Holtz-Eakin, 2000; Fairlie et al., 2014; Inci, 2013; Leibenstein, 1987; Weitzel et al., 2010).”