Talent workers as entrepreneurs: a new approach to aspirational self-employment

Using the concept of so-called talent workers (Hsieh et al. 2016), we ask what is the link between wage employment as a talent worker and subsequent establishing of business. Individuals with tertiary education and experience in specific occupations skills are in principle more likely to develop or adopt innovations necessary for the entrepreneurial success. We employ over a decade of individual level data on changes in the labor market status for Poland – a country with high levels of self-employment and analyze transitions to self-employment as opposed to switching jobs. We find that talent workers are more likely to become self-employed than to change a job. We also find that the odds of creating more than one job position are higher among talent workers who switch to self-employment than among other groups of workers who become self-employed. These results are robust to two possibly confounding effects – within sector mobility and higher productivity of workers before entering self-employment.