Demographics and Entrepreneurship / James Liang, Hui Wang, Edward P. Lazear.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Liang, James.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Wang, Hui.

Lazear, Edward P.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w20506.

NBER working paper series no. w20506

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

Entrepreneurship requires energy and creativity as well as business acumen. Some factors that contribute to entrepreneurship may decline with age, but business skills increase with experience in high level positions. Having too many older workers in society slows entrepreneurship. Older workers do not possess the advantages of youth, but more significant is that when older workers occupy key positions they may block younger workers from acquiring business skills. A formal theoretical structure is presented and tested using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data. The results imply that a one-standard deviation decrease in the median age of a country increases the rate of new business formation by 2.5 percentage points, which is about forty percent of the mean rate. Furthermore, older societies have lower rates of entrepreneurship at every age.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2014.