IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/fosoec/v46y2017i2p145-159.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Can Income Diversification Explain the Growing Entrepreneurship Gap by Age?

Author

Listed:
  • Christian E. Weller
  • Jeffrey B. Wenger

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has declined among households younger than 50 years, while it has grown among older households over the past few decades. We hypothesize that this divergence results from younger households having less diversified income from sources unrelated to business income such as capital income and annuity income than is the case for older households. Using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance, we calculate descriptive and multivariate statistics. We find that income diversification from capital income has declined for both younger and older households, while the role of income diversification in people working as entrepreneurs has fallen among younger households and stayed constant among older ones. We also find some tentative evidence that income diversification from Social Security and annuity income plays a role in determining entrepreneurship for older households, but has no effect among younger households. Our results suggest that cash income, unrelated to risky business income, plays a crucial role in determining entrepreneurship and could explain the divergent entrepreneurship experience between younger and older households.

Suggested Citation

  • Christian E. Weller & Jeffrey B. Wenger, 2017. "Can Income Diversification Explain the Growing Entrepreneurship Gap by Age?," Forum for Social Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(2), pages 145-159, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:fosoec:v:46:y:2017:i:2:p:145-159
    DOI: 10.1080/07360932.2017.1307136
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/07360932.2017.1307136
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/07360932.2017.1307136?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kevin E. Cahill & Michael D. Giandrea & Joseph F. Quinn, 2013. "New Evidence on Self-Employment Transitions Among Older Americans with Career Jobs," Working Papers 463, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    2. Kevin E. Cahill & Michael D. Giandrea & Joseph F. Quinn, 2013. "New Evidence on Self-Employment Transitions Among Older Americans with Career Jobs," Economic Working Papers 463, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    3. Fairlie, Robert, 2015. "The Kauffman Index: Startup Activity | National Trends," Santa Cruz Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt5cb198rq, Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jacqueline Chattopadhyay, 2018. "State Health Insurance Regulation and Self-Employment Rates After the Great Recession: The Role of Guaranteed Issue Mandates," Economic Development Quarterly, , vol. 32(1), pages 78-92, February.
    2. Cal J Halvorsen & Yu-Chih Chen, 2019. "The diversity of interest in later-life entrepreneurship: Results from a nationally representative survey of Americans aged 50 to 70," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(6), pages 1-21, June.
    3. Raquel Fonseca & Simon Lord & Simon C. Parker, 2020. "Self-Employment at Older Ages in Canada," CIRANO Working Papers 2020s-11, CIRANO.
    4. Nadia Simoes & Nuno Crespo & Sandrina B. Moreira, 2016. "Individual Determinants Of Self-Employment Entry: What Do We Really Know?," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(4), pages 783-806, September.
    5. Conen, Wieteke & Schippers, Johannes Jan & Schulze Buschoff, Karin, 2016. "Self-employed without personnel between freedom and insecurity," WSI Studies 05, The Institute of Economic and Social Research (WSI), Hans Böckler Foundation.
    6. Nolan, Anne & Barrett, Alan, 2019. "The role of self-employment in Ireland’s older workforce," The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, Elsevier, vol. 14(C).
    7. Nabamita Dutta & Saibal Kar & Russell S. Sobel, 2021. "What influences entrepreneurship among skilled immigrants in the USA? Evidence from micro-data," Business Economics, Palgrave Macmillan;National Association for Business Economics, vol. 56(3), pages 146-154, July.
    8. Hazarika, Bhabesh & Goswami, Kishor, 2014. "Rural Non-Farm Micro-Entrepreneurship or Not: Gender Issue in Decision Making," EconStor Conference Papers 125611, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    9. Adil Outla & Moustapha Hamzaoui, 2021. "Individual Determinants of Self-employment Entry in Social and Conventional Entrepreneurship: Are co-operatives different? [Déterminants individuels de l'accès au travail indépendant dans le cadre ," Working Papers hal-03271694, HAL.
    10. Joseph F. Quinn & Kevin E. Cahill, 2015. "The New World of Retirement Income Security in America," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 887, Boston College Department of Economics.
    11. Xaver Neumeyer & Susana C. Santos & Michael H. Morris, 2019. "Who is left out: exploring social boundaries in entrepreneurial ecosystems," The Journal of Technology Transfer, Springer, vol. 44(2), pages 462-484, April.
    12. Timothy Bates & William D. Bradford & Robert Seamans, 2018. "Minority entrepreneurship in twenty-first century America," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 50(3), pages 415-427, March.
    13. Chandler Nick, 2019. "Standing alone? A review of the characteristics of the entrepreneur through the actor-activity-attitude framework," Prosperitas, Budapest Business University, vol. 6(1), pages 12-34.
    14. Kevin E. Cahill, & Michael D. Giandrea, & Joseph F. Quinn, 2013. "Are Gender Differences Emerging in the Retirement Patterns of the Early Boomers?," Working Papers 468, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    15. Farzana Chowdhury & David B. Audretsch, 2021. "A dynamic relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurial activity," Journal of International Entrepreneurship, Springer, vol. 19(3), pages 339-356, September.
    16. Zandberg, Jonathan, 2021. "Family comes first: Reproductive health and the gender gap in entrepreneurship," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 140(3), pages 838-864.
    17. Monica Fisher & Paul A. Lewin, 2018. "Push and pull factors and Hispanic self-employment in the USA," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 51(4), pages 1055-1070, December.
    18. Mack, Elizabeth A. & Marie-Pierre, Lisa & Redican, Kyle, 2017. "Entrepreneurs’ use of internet and social media applications," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 120-139.
    19. Eesley, Charles & Wang, Yanbo, 2017. "Social influence in career choice: Evidence from a randomized field experiment on entrepreneurial mentorship," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(3), pages 636-650.
    20. Borowiecki, Karol Jan, 2019. "The Origins of Creativity: The Case of the Arts in the United States since 1850," Discussion Papers on Economics 11/2019, University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    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:taf:fosoec:v:46:y:2017:i:2:p:145-159. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFSE20 .

    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.