Who wishes to be an entrepreneur and who prepares for that? : Evidence from statistical micro data in Japan over 30 years

Entrepreneurial process has been attracting much attention thus far, but no detailed empirical studies have been conducted on the determinants of the willingness to and the preparation for business start-up with a representative large sample. Especially in Japan, where start-up ratio and the number of people who wish to start their own business have decreased for decades, empirical analyses from a long term perspective are essential to consider why entrepreneurship in Japan experiences such a long-run downturn. However, previous empirical studies use one-shot dataset, and lack such a long term perspective. This paper aims to fill this gap using statistical micro data from the Employment Status Survey in Japan in seven survey cohorts for 30 years. We estimate what types of individuals wish to start up own business and prepare for that considering age, generation, gender, family status, education, income, occupation and employment types, firm size, job tenure, and industry. We find that the determinants of the willingness to and the preparation for business start-up are partially different and that household head dummy has positive, while female dummy, firm size and job tenure have negative effects on both willingness to and preparation for self-employment in all survey cohorts. We also find that the age effect on entrepreneurial process changes over time, with the peak of the willingness to start-up shifting towards older generation.

Center for Research on Contemporary Economic Systems, Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University

2017-04

English(eng)

technical report

VoR

25

CCES Discussion Paper Series

https://hdl.handle.net/10086/28525