Entrepreneurship is a strange thing. Entrepreneurs work longer hours, make less money in expectation, and have higher variance earnings than those working for firms; if anyone knows of solid evidence to the contrary, I would love to see the reference. The social value of entrepreneurship through greater product market competition, new goods, etc., is very high, so as a society the strange choice of entrepreneurs may be a net benefit. We even encourage it here at UT! Given these facts, why does anyone start a company anyway?
Astebro and coauthors, as part of a new JEP symposium on entrepreneurship, look at evidence from behavioral economics. The evidence isn’t totally conclusive, but it appears entrepreneurs are not any more risk-loving or ambiguity-loving than the average person. Though they are overoptimistic, you still see entrepreneurs in high-risk, low-performance firms even ten years after they are founded, at which point surely any overoptimism must have long since been beaten out of them.
It is, however, true that entrepreneurship is much more common among the well-off. If risk aversion can’t explain things, then perhaps entrepreneurship is in some sense consumption: the founders value independence and control. Experimental evidence provides fairly strong evidence for this hypothesis. For many entrepreneurs, it is more about not having a boss than about the small chance of becoming very rich.
This leads to a couple questions: why so many immigrant entrepreneurs, and what are we make of the declining rate of firm formation in the US? Pardon me if I speculate a bit here. The immigrant story may just be selection; almost by definition, those who move across borders, especially those who move for graduate school, tend to be quite independent! The declining rate of firm formation may be tied with inequality changes; to the extent that entrepreneurship involves consumption of a luxury good (control over one’s working life) in addition to standard risk-adjusted cost-benefit analysis, then changes in the income distribution will change that consumption pattern. More work is needed on these questions.
Summer 2014 JEP (RePEc IDEAS). As always, a big thumbs up to the JEP for being free to read! It is also worth checking out the companion articles by Bill Kerr and coauthors on experimentation, with some amazing stats using internal VC project evaluation data for which ex-ante projections were basically identical for ex-post failures and ex-post huge successes, and one by Haltiwanger and coauthors documenting the important role played by startups in job creation, the collapse in startup formation and job churn which began well before 2008, and the utter mystery about what is causing this collapse (which we can see across regions and across industries).
A Fine Theorem 