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Teaching entrepreneurship students about failure can help them better cope with business failure and learn from it. This is important given evidence that experienced entrepreneurs are more successful. Entrepreneurship educators raise the concern that teaching students about failure may make them apprehensive about pursuing entrepreneurship. We examine the impact of optimism training on individuals who are learning about business failure (distinguishing between large and small failure) to study the impact of failure on career choice. Using a randomized experiment, we study the underlying mechanism – the feeling of hope – in how failure magnitude impacts an individual's subsequent career choice between wage employment and entrepreneurship. Our findings show that failure magnitude negatively impacts subsequent entrepreneurship career choice by reducing hope. We also find that having an optimistic mind-set moderates this relationship. The negative effect of failure on hope, and subsequent entrepreneurship career choice, is minimized for individuals with an optimistic mind-set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores religion and religiosity in the field of entrepreneurship. Based on an original, international dataset of 740 students, we examine the impact of individual religious affiliation (Protestant, Catholic or Muslim) or non-affiliation (Agnostic/Atheist) on entrepreneurial intentions. We further examine the influence of individual religiosity (beyond mere religious affiliation) on entrepreneurial intentions, offering new insights as to the role religion and religiosity play in entrepreneurship. Findings support the notion that religion matters when entrepreneurial intentions are concerned. We show that having a religious affiliation – as compared to identifying as an Agnostic/Atheist – has a positive relationship with entrepreneurial intentions. More importantly, we show that religiosity – not just religious affiliation – affects intentions differently across different religions, thus pointing to the importance of taking religiosity into account, and not only religious affiliation. We also show that followers of a specific religion cannot be regarded as a uniform group when it comes to entrepreneurship and that it is important to differentiate between streams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]