Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/20147 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2003
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 911
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the jack-of-all-trades view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. The intuition behind this proposition is that entrepreneurs must have sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to put together the many ingredients needed for survival and success in a business, while for paid employees it suffices and pays to be a specialist in the field demanded by the job taken. This paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing Lazear's hypothesis using a large recent representative sample of the German population. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of becoming a nascent entrepreneur and the regional stratification of the sample into account. The results illustrate the statistical significance and economic importance of the jack-of-all-trades theory.
Subjects: 
entrepreneurship
jack-of-all-trades theory
rare events logit
Germany
JEL: 
R12
J23
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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