TY  - BOOK
AU  - Hamilton,Barton H.
AU  - Papageorge,Nicholas W.
AU  - Pande,Nidhi
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Right Stuff? Personality and Entrepreneurship
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2018///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - September 2018; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - We construct a structural model of entry into self-employment to evaluate the impact of policies supporting entrepreneurship. Previous work has recognized that workers may opt for self-employment due to the non-pecuniary benefits of running a business and not necessarily because they are good at it. Other literature has examined how socio-emotional skills, such as personality traits, affect selection into self-employment. We link these two lines of inquiry. The model we estimate captures three factors that affect selection into self-employment: credit constraints, relative earnings and preferences. We incorporate personality traits by allowing them to affect sector-specific earnings as well as preferences. The estimated model reveals that the personality traits that make entrepreneurship profitable are not always the same traits driving people to open a business. This has important consequences for entrepreneurship policies. For example, subsidies for small businesses do not attract talented-but-reluctant entrepreneurs, but instead attract individuals with personality traits associated with strong preferences for running a business and low-quality business ideas
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w25006
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w25006
ER  -