TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Wagner, Joachim
        TI  - Are Nascent Entrepreneurs Jacks-of-All-Trades? A Test of Lazear's Theory of Entrepreneurship with German Data
        PY  - 2003/Oct/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 911
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp911
        AB  - 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.
        KW  - rare events logit
KW  - Germany
KW  - jack-of-all-trades theory
KW  - entrepreneurship
        ER  -