To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2010.02.012 Byline: Marco Caliendo (a)(b)(c), Frank Fossen (b), Alexander Kritikos (b)(d)(a)(c) Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Risk attitudes; Survival Abstract: Risk attitudes influence the complete life cycle of entrepreneurs. Whereas recent research underpins the theoretical proposition of a positive correlation between risk attitudes and the decision to become self-employed, the effects on survival are not as straightforward. Psychological research posits an inverse U-shaped relationship between risk attitudes and entrepreneurial survival. On the basis of experimentally validated data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we examine the extent to which risk attitudes influence survival rates in self-employment in Germany. The empirical results confirm that persons whose risk attitudes are in the medium range survive significantly longer as entrepreneurs than do persons with particularly low or high risk attitudes. Author Affiliation: (a) Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany (b) German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin, Germany (c) IAB Nuremberg, Germany (d) University of Potsdam, Germany Article History: Received 9 September 2009; Revised 26 January 2010; Accepted 18 February 2010 Article Note: (footnote) [star] The authors thank David Audretsch, Friedel Bolle, Philipp Koellinger, Guenther F. Mueller, Alexander Schiersch, Viktor Steiner and two anonymous referees for valuable comments, and Davud Rostam-Afschar for excellent research assistance. Previous versions of the paper were presented at the IAREP conference 2008 in Rome and the EEA conference 2008 in Milan. Fossen thanks the German Research Foundation (DFG) for financial support of the project STE 681/7-1. The usual disclaimer applies.