Matt Dickson (University of Bath)
Orietta Marsili and Georgios Tsiachtsiras
It is well known that the children of entrepreneurs are more likely than other children to become entrepreneurs themselves. But why is this? We explore the persistence of entrepreneurship across generations by adopting a life-course perspective in which the decision to engage in entrepreneurship is seen as a career choice developing in stages, from childhood, to adolescence, to early adulthood. Using data from a UK cohort study following thousands of children from pre-birth through to age 29, we examine how childrens entrepreneurial decisions are impacted by the time-points in their upbringing that their parent(s) were entrepreneurs at birth, at age eight, or at age 18. To further investigate the transmission pathways, we compare the impact on the childs entrepreneurial decision of having a biological parent who is an entrepreneur, with the impact of a step-parent entrepreneur, and whether this differs depending on the gender of the child, the timing in childhood, and whether the parent and child live in the same household. This allows us to partially separate out the effect of non-genetic transmission factors from biologically inherited proclivity towards entrepreneurship. We find that maternal and paternal transmission effects are equally important but present different pathways. Maternal transmission is dependent on the childs gender, while biological paternal transmission is conditional on the fathers living arrangement. Non-biological paternal transmission is weaker and dependent on childs age and gender. Overall, our results suggest the existence of interdependence between intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship, family structure, and the childs lived experience of parental relationships.