Fail but Try Again? The Effects of Age, Gender, and Multiple–Owner Experience on Failed Entrepreneurs’ Reentry

Abstract

We investigate what leads failed entrepreneurs to reenter entrepreneurship by taking a developmental career perspective. Specifically, we hypothesize that the age of failed entrepreneurs has a non-linear relationship with the likelihood of reentering entrepreneurship that follows different career stages (early, middle, and late). The gender of failed entrepreneurs and multipleowner experience in the failed firm are hypothesized to be moderators of this relationship. We test our hypotheses using a database consisting of the Swedish population, including 4,761 entrepreneurs who failed between 2000 and 2004. Analyzing their career paths over the years following their failure offers support for our theoretical expectations.

Determinants of female entrepreneurship success across Saudi Arabia

“…Most previous studies on gender and entrepreneurship indicate that males display higher self-efficacy and higher risk-taking behavior than females, but show less need for entrepreneurial education (Ba u, Sieger, Eddleston, & Chirico, 2017;Eddleston, Ladge, Mitteness, & Balachandra, 2016;Wilson et al, 2007). Males with an entrepreneurial family background are more likely to start their own business than females with an entrepreneurial family background (Matthews & Moser, 1996).…”

Gender (in)equality within the household and business start-up among mothers

“…These are official statistics, which are considered highly accurate and reliable (cf. Baù et al 2017;Wennberg et al 2011;Wiklund et al 2013).…”

“…Research has shown that education is an important factor in explaining a person's decision to start a business, especially for women in high-income countries (Allen et al 2007). Similarly, it has been shown that prior experiences as an entrepreneur might provide important skills and social capital that could be exploited in a novel initiative (Baù et al 2017); thus, we controlled for mother's prior entrepreneurial experience, dummy coded as "1" if the mother had an entrepreneurial activity terminated or sold before the birth of the child, "0" otherwise. Moreover, to provide the complementary perspective of the partner's parental leave used as an independent variable, we control for the mother's parental leave, calculated as the mother's parental benefits paid in the year, divided by the mother's individual's income in the same year.…”

The Liability of Volatility and How it Changes Over Time Among New Ventures

“…The literature on organizational learning and entrepreneurial learning argues that new ventures are able to evaluate the appropriateness of various change initiatives and that, as a consequence, post-founding, entrepreneurs adapt based on the feedback they receive (Minniti & Bygrave, 2001). This literature claims not only that entrepreneurs learn from previous experiences (Baù et al, 2017), but also that new ventures learn differently and more effectively than established organizations (e.g., Sapienza et al, 2006;Zahra et al, 2000).…”

“…Founder age is expected to have a broadly positive relationship with new venture survival (Baù et al, 2017) being lowest amongst the young and inexperienced (Parker 2018), hence we control for founder age (Founder age) and founder age squared (Founder age_sq).…”