IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ebg/heccah/0977.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Economic Returns to Entrepreneurship – Implications for Stimulating Entrepreneurship

Author

Listed:
  • Astebro , Thomas B.

Abstract

Recent evidence on relative earnings from entrepreneurship versus wage work shows that after controlling for observable differences, entrepreneurs in most developed countries on average apparently earn less than employees. Does this mean that the choice of entrepreneurship should be encouraged or discouraged? The answer depends in part on whether one believes that entrepreneurs report their income truthfully or not. Adjusting for what is considered underreporting by entrepreneurs using observed differences in expenditures lifts entrepreneurial mean earnings by between 10 percent and 40 percent, reversing the above mentioned negative difference into a positive difference. If this adjustment result continues to hold in further analysis, there is no a priori reason to increase the support of entrepreneurs in developed countries, and one should discuss decreasing it.

Suggested Citation

  • Astebro , Thomas B., 2013. "The Economic Returns to Entrepreneurship – Implications for Stimulating Entrepreneurship," HEC Research Papers Series 977, HEC Paris.
  • Handle: RePEc:ebg:heccah:0977
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2258562
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Entrepreneurship; returns; income underreporting; public policy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J23 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Demand
    • M13 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - New Firms; Startups

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebg:heccah:0977. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Antoine Haldemann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/hecpafr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.