Money, money, money? A longitudinal investigation of entrepreneur career reasons, growth preferences and achieved growthстатья из журнала
Аннотация: Abstract This paper longitudinally examines the relationship between the career reasons of nascent entrepreneurs, their growth preferences and subsequent growth achieved. The longitudinal design allows for examination and control of both survivorship and recall bias upon career reason and growth linkages. Substantial recall bias was observed in the career reasons of entrepreneurs, with the reported importance of self-realization and financial success, as explanations for entering venturing activity, being significantly lower when responses were obtained once the venture was operational. Consistent with economic motives, the importance that the entrepreneur places on financial success was a key determinant to explain cross-sectional differences in growth preferences of the entrepreneur, the intended size of the venture, and achieved growth. Further, the importance of financial success was robust to the use of both prospective and retrospective career reasons. While independence was the most important factor to explain the career choices of nascent entrepreneurs, independence was also found to be negatively associated with intended and achieved employment growth. Overall, the findings demonstrate that nascent entrepreneur career reasons for self-employment are not homogeneous, vary by growth intentions and preferences, and are associated with subsequent venture growth achieved. Keywords: career reasonsgrowthintentionsnascent entrepreneurpreferencesstartups Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Sophie Anderson and Justin Craig, participants from the 2004 Babson College/Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneurship Research Conference, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This research would not have been possible without the help of the Entrepreneurial Research Consortium. Notes Notes 1. An additional requirement is to only include entrepreneurs who are involved in start-ups without team involvement. This requirement should provide a less noisy setting to investigate career reason-growth intention relationships due to the exclusion of influences from other team members who may have their own preferences. However, this requirement limits the generalizability of the study findings and reduces the sample size to approximately 40% of the current sample. Consistent with the reported findings, the empirical results from only including non-team start-ups strongly support the relationship between growth preferences and the importance of financial success. 2. An alternative definition that classifies start-ups as operating businesses if they: (1) had invested their own money; (2) received income from the sale of goods and services; and (3) filed a federal income tax return, resulted in 204 start-ups being identified as operating businesses. The key findings are invariant to the use of this alternative definition based on gestation milestones rather than the respondents’ self-classified measure. 3. Approximately 29% (56) of the respondents provided actual sales (total employment) in more than one wave of the survey. To ensure that the findings were not spuriously caused by the choice to use information from the most recent interview, the analysis of actual sales and employment was also undertaken using information from the first interview with actual sales or employment data. The findings of the positive association between financial success and actual sales, and independence and actual employment are invariant to this alternative decision rule. 4. A disadvantage of including all career reasons in a regression model is the inability to observe the absolute or relative importance of each career reason. However, the main findings for actual entrepreneurs are the same as those presented in table 3 for nascent entrepreneurs, namely that: (1) growth preferences are significantly positively associated with the importance of financial success; (2) independence is not significantly associated with growth preferences; and (3) independence was the most important career reason for actual entrepreneurs. Consequently, these results for the actual entrepreneur sub-sample are not reported. 5. To ensure that specification of the model was not driving the results presented, regressions were also performed using bias-corrected bootstrapping (BCB) and regressions using ranks of the dependent and independent variables. The BCB approach selects observations with replacement equal to the sample size. For this study the selection process was repeated for 1000 iterations. From this procedure an estimate of the parameter and computation of the bias-corrected confidence for each parameter is determined, which is used to determine the level of statistical significance. This process was undertaken for each regression. Given this approach does not rely on normal theory standard errors, it overcomes non-normality concerns (Jeong and Maddala 1993 Jeong, J and Maddala, GS. 1993. “A perspective on application of bootstrap methods in econometrics”. In Handbook of Statistics, Edited by: Maddala, GS, Rao, CR and Vinod, HD. Vol. 11, 573–610. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. [Google Scholar]). The inferences found using BCB and rank regression were consistent with the GMM results and consequently were not reported.
Год издания: 2007
Авторы: Gavin Cassar
Издательство: Taylor & Francis
Источник: Entrepreneurship and Regional Development
Ключевые слова: Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences, Family Business Performance and Succession, Innovation and Socioeconomic Development
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 19
Выпуск: 1
Страницы: 89–107