Becoming a First-time Entrepreneur in 40s and Older: Lessons from Survival Analysis

This article aims to understand better a specific group of first-time entrepreneurs starting a business at the age of 40 years and older (associated in the literature with the term "third age" or "silver age"), often experiencing career shocks or feeling a need to change their working lives and habits. The research explores the situation in the small, open Central European economy – the Czech Republic. It is based on extensive business register data covering the years 2010–2023, allowing first-time entrepreneurs within this age group to be captured. These individual-level data, combined with information from other sources, created a dataset of 178,388 first-time entrepreneurs aged 40+ by the time of starting their business. These were used to study their characteristics and to analyse factors shaping their business survival. We found that, on average, 12,857 individuals aged 40+ join entrepreneurship for the first time annually; their characteristics differ in terms of age, gender, sectoral orientation, region of doing business, and education. The results from the Cox-Hazard survival analysis support the importance of these factors, highlighting, for example, that females had higher chances of closing their business activity, and the likelihood of closing the business increases with age. This article uniquely addresses the population of third-age entrepreneurs in a specific country context. Becoming an entrepreneur at the third age might be an opportunity to change working habits, leave employment, and enhance work-life balance through an entrepreneurial career pathway. This is important, especially in the context of population ageing and increased life length expectancy, allowing individuals to stay economically active longer.