%0 Report
        %A Wagner, Joachim
        %T Are Nascent Entrepreneurs Jacks-of-All-Trades? A Test of Lazear's Theory of Entrepreneurship with German Data
        %D 2003
        %8 2003 Oct
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 911
        %U https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp911
        %X 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.
        %K rare events logit
%K Germany
%K jack-of-all-trades theory
%K entrepreneurship