The Effect of Parental Self-Employment on Entry Age

Abstract

An established result of empirical entrepreneurship literature is that parental self-employment has a positive effect on entrepreneurial entry. Far less is known about the parental effect on the important strategic decision about time of entry. This is surprising since the mechanisms behind the parental entrepreneurship effect are similar to those behind the relationship between market entry and a person’s age at entry. We find that parental self-employment is associated with a lower age at entry. We also discuss implications of this pattern for the size of start-up and post-entry development. Our evidence is based on a sample of entrepreneurs from two developing countries namely Ghana and Kenya. Our findings are particularly important for developing countries since mostly weak institutional framework conditions provide only few opportunities for acquiring out-of-family entrepreneurship education and training.