【主讲】于丽 助教授 (中央财经大学)
【主题】Bachelor's degrees and business start-ups: A reexamination of Lazear's Theory of Entrepreneurship
【时间】2012年5月25日 (周五) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼801室
【语言】英文
【摘要】Edward Lazear developed a theory that entrepreneurs must be Jacks-of-All-Trades (JAT) whose skills complement those of the more specialized workers they employ. He showed the entrepreneurs will invest in general skills by selecting highly varied academic and employment experiences, allowing them to efficiently direct the talents of their employees. We build upon Lazear's single period model to study business entry choices during the life cycle, dynamically endogenizing human capital investment. We model the unobservable entrepreneurial skill as an ultimate mechanism driving the positive correlation between academic and occupational choices and entrepreneurial entry over time. Using a data base of Iowa State alumni graduating between 1982 and 2006, this study confirms a central assumption in Lazear's model that there exists a common unobserved factor that jointly raises the probability of selecting a broad college curriculum, having a more varied work career, and ultimately starting a business. However, academic diversity is also found to be initially important to starting a business but its importance declines over time, a prediction of our extension of the JAT model.
