Kauffman Dissertation Executive Summary: How Entrepreneurial Do You Choose to Be? Talent, Risk Attitudes, Overconfidence and Self-Selection into Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The main study in my dissertation posits that prospective entrepreneurs face a spectrum of entrepreneurial choices rather than a binary employment-entrepreneurship decision and explores how cognitive determinants influence these choices. I construct a novel dataset in the real estate brokerage industry, one in which all individuals are self-employed but the roles they pursue vary in degree of risk, autonomy and returns to talent. I find differences in specialized and general talent, risk attitudes and overconfidence help predict sorting into these roles, suggesting that past research that relies solely on a self-employment definition of entrepreneurship or on uni-dimensional drivers has obscured these more complex choices.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, self-employment, entry determinants, cognitive biases, risk attitudes, overconfidence, specialized talent, productivity

JEL Classification: J23, J24, L85, M13