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Plain English SummaryEntrepreneurship research questions the core assumptions of other academic fields and legitimizes them both practically and academically. Since the 1980s, entrepreneurship research has seen tremendous growth and development, establishing itself as an academic field. Entrepreneurship is also taught extensively in leading business schools around the world. Indeed, few business schools do not address entrepreneurship in their curriculum. This represents a sea change: although entrepreneurs and new ventures had a remarkable impact on society, academia barely noticed it in the 1980s. Simply put: economics and business students rarely, if ever, encountered any mention of entrepreneurship during their studies. While entrepreneurship research has now developed its own methodological toolbox, it has extensively borrowed perspectives, theories, and methods from other fields. In the 2020s, we now find that entrepreneurship scholars are sharing its toolbox with other academic fields, questioning the core assumptions of other academic fields and providing new insights into the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of their respective core phenomena. Moreover, entrepreneurship research helps to legitimize other academic fields both practically and academically. Hence, entrepreneurship research now plays not just an important role in entrepreneurship education, practice, and policy but also throughout many other research fields.The remarkable ascent of entrepreneurship witnessed as a scientific field over the last 4 decades has been made possible by entrepreneurship's ability to absorb theories, paradigms, and methods from other fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, geography, and even biology. The respectability of entrepreneurship as an academic discipline is now evidenced by many other fields starting to borrow from the entrepreneurship view. In the present paper, seven examples are given from this "pay back" development. These examples were first presented during a seminar at the Erasmus Entrepreneurship Event called what has the entrepreneurship view to offer to other academic fields? This article elaborates on the core ideas of these presentations and focuses on the overarching question of how entrepreneurship research impacts the development of other academic fields. We found that entrepreneurship research questions the core assumptions of other academic fields and provides new insights into the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of their respective core phenomena. Moreover, entrepreneurship research helps to legitimize other academic fields both practically and academically.

Technostress is an important by-product of information and communication technologies (ICT). The technostress literature suggests focusing on specific dimensions of technostress, such as techno-overload, which describes when ICT usage demands to work faster and longer. However, only a few studies have dealt with the technostress of small business owners, let alone techno-overload. This is surprising since work overload in general has been identified as an important dimension of job stress for small business owners, and technostress has been identified as an important impediment for workers in general. The aim of the current study is to investigate the effect of techno-overload on well-being outcomes (as a composite measure consisting of physical well-being, mental well-being, sleep quality, burnout, and loneliness) using three data sets of French small business owners. Our results indicate a strong negative correlation between techno-overload and our composite measure of well-being for all three data sets. We interpret our findings for several different disciplines: information systems, small business owners and entrepreneurship, health and well-being, psychology and organization studies. Our data also allow for the identification of contextual effects–the COVID-19 pandemic–since one survey was conducted before, one at the start of, and one during the pandemic.

Abstract The COVID-19 crisis presents manifest threats for entrepreneurs since their business survival is often directly at stake given the alarming economic downturn. This existential threat, together with their crucial role in the economy, is the reason for the plethora of public financial support schemes being implemented throughout the entire world. However, support schemes for mental health are lacking. We aim to investigate, first, whether burnout levels have increased during the crisis and, second, whether burnout levels during the COVID-19 crisis depend on the threat of becoming ill, having to stay at home due to the lockdown, and/or having to file for bankruptcy due to the economic downturn. We do so using seven data sets of French entrepreneurs with a temporal comparison of averages and two data sets of French entrepreneurs with a cross-sectional analysis of individuals. Our findings show that indeed, the risks of burnout have increased during the pandemic and that the threat of bankruptcy is the dominant threat. As an increasing number of studies in the entrepreneurship literature indicate that entrepreneurs’ mental health influences their activities, as well as the growth and sustainability of their ventures, our study is important and timely in its contribution, as it takes a close look at the perception of burnout in general and more specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Plain English Summary The risk of burnout in French entrepreneurs has increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, which calls for not only financial support but also other forms of support. The COVID-19 pandemic presents many threats for entrepreneurs since their business survival is often directly at stake. These threats are not just financial but also related to health, such as the threat of burnout. The findings of our study show that for French entrepreneurs, the threat of burnout increased after the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. This finding raises the question whether this outcome is due to the threat to health, the effects of the lockdown, or the threat of bankruptcy. It appears that all three factors play important roles, although the financial threat is the dominant threat. These findings call for the extension of entrepreneurial support systems beyond the financial area by also involving an “entrepreneurship care” aspect, which includes telephone support, webinars, and mental help facilities.

Several studies have observed a relationship between (subclinical levels of) attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and entrepreneurship. Recently, Yu et al. (Entrep Theory Pract 10.1177/1042258719892987, 2019) and Wismans et al. (Appl Psychol 69:1093–1112 10.1111/apps.12247, 2020) observed a positive association between hyperactivity and entrepreneurial orientation (EO). The present study seeks to replicate these findings in an entirely different culture, that of Japan. Moreover, because of the low internal consistency of the hyperactivity measure across studies, we study the individual contributions of the hyperactivity items. Using a sample of 255 Japanese business owners, we conducted OLS regressions and PLS-structural equation modelling. The results of our study on the ADHD-EO relationship in Japan are partly in line with previous findings: the positive link between hyperactivity and EO is again confirmed. In contrast with the results of previous studies, we find a positive link between overall ADHD symptoms and EO using both methods and a positive link between attention-deficit and EO using one of the methods (PLS-SEM). Cultural differences may explain these different findings. When the two hyperactivity items are separated, they appear to have different associations with EO. One item, measuring mental hyperactivity, is strongly positively associated with EO, whereas the other item, measuring physical hyperactivity, is not associated with EO. This result is a new and interesting finding that is replicated in the current study using the French dataset of Wismans et al. (Appl Psychol 69:1093–1112 10.1111/apps.12247, 2020) but which warrants further research.

The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 15 contributions of the special issue on the “Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses,” the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the effect on entrepreneurship and small businesses; a discussion of four literature strands based on this review; an overview of the contributions in this special issue; and some ideas for post-pandemic economic research., Plain English Summary Responding to COVID-19 involves not just shielding small business jobs, supporting entrepreneurship, and raising government debt but also creating productive entrepreneurship and resilient location-specific entrepreneurial ecosystems. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented challenge for small businesses that also brings new market opportunities. The papers in this special issue of Small Business Economics Journal aim to shed light on the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at the macro- and microeconomic effects on entrepreneurship and small businesses as well as the role of financial support policies and well-being in both developed and developing countries. Future research should focus on the role of digitization and financial mechanisms supporting small businesses during crises.

We examine the association between several behavioral and electrophysiological indices of impulsivity-related constructs and multiple entrepreneurial constructs. Specifically, we investigate if these behavioral and electrophysiological measures are more useful as predictors of entrepreneurship than self-reported measures of impulsivity. Our findings are based on two datasets (n = 133 and n = 142) and indicate that behavioral and electrophysiological impulsivity measures are not robustly associated with entrepreneurship constructs, in contrast to self-reported measures of impulsivity. Though disappointing at first, our findings pave the way for future research on the relevance of behavioral and electrophysiological measures for entrepreneurship.

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, governments set recommendations and restrictions that have given rise to new situations that require residents to deliberate and respond nonautomatically. For highly impulsive individuals, dealing with these situations may be harder, as they tend to deliberate less about the consequences of their behaviors. In this study, we investigate the relationship between impulsivity and delay discounting on the one hand and compliance with COVID-19 restrictions on the other hand. We distinguish between compliance with social distancing measures and compliance with hygiene measures. Regression analyses of an international sample of 6759 students from seven European countries reveal that the self-reported personality construct of impulsivity is negatively related to both types of compliance behavior. However, and unexpectedly, we also find a weak positive association between the discount rate—as measured by a behavioral task—and compliance. Our study highlights the importance of individual differences in impulsivity in regard to compliance with public health measures during a pandemic.

Dans ce bref article, nous motivons l’approfondissement de l’examen de la société entrepreneuriale en soulevant une série de questions assez générales, mais fondamentales pour qui souhaite la décrire et comprendre ses mécanismes. Avant d’examiner ces questions, nous fixons quelques balises sous forme de propositions. Nous en retenons deux à savoir, d’une part, l’unité d’observation et les niveaux auxquels se poseraient les enjeux fondamentaux de la société entrepreneuriale à savoir l’individu et l’interindividualité et, d’autre part, une proposition relative à la place du travail qui y occuperait une place centrale. Les questions soulevées esquissent un programme de recherche de grande ampleur., In this brief article, we motivate the deepening of the examination of the entrepreneurial society by raising a series of rather general but fundamental questions for those who wish to describe it and understand its mechanisms. Before examining these questions, we set some guidelines in the form of proposals. We retain two of them, namely, on the one hand, the unit of observation and the levels, i.e. the individual and the interindividual levels, at which the fundamental stakes of the entrepreneurial society arise and, on the other hand, a proposition about the place of labor which would occupy a central place. The issues raised outline a big research agenda., En este breve artículo, se exhorta a profundizar el estudio de la sociedad emprendedora al plantear una serie de preguntas bastantes generales pero fundamentales para aquellos que desean describirla y comprender sus mecanismos. Antes de examinar estas cuestiones, establecemos algunas pautas en forma de proposición. Retenemos dos de ellas, por un lado, la unidad de observación y el nivel en el que se plantearían los desafíos fundamentales de la sociedad emprendedora, es decir, el individuo y la interindividualidad, y por otro lado, una proposición con respecto al trabajo que ocuparía un lugar central en dicha sociedad. Las cuestiones planteadas esbozan una amplio programa de investigación.

Drawing on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, we examine the role of two types of family support—emotional and instrumental support—in work-family balance and subjective well-being of smal...

Despite many studies examining a combination of self-report, behavioral, and neurophysiological measures, only few address whether these different levels of measurement indeed reflect one construct. The present study aids in filling this gap by exploring the association between self-report, behavioral, and electrophysiological measures of impulsivity and related constructs such as sensation seeking, reward responsiveness, and ADHD symptoms. Individuals across two large samples (n = 133 and n = 142) completed questionnaires and performed behavioral tasks (the Eriksen Flanker task, the Go/No-Go task, the Reward task, and the Balloon Analogue Risk Task) during which brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG). The resulting data showed that even though the correlations within each level of measurement were prominent, there was no evidence of significant correlations across the three measurement levels. These findings contradict the outcomes of some previous, smaller studies, which did report significant associations between self-reported impulsivity(-related) measures and behavior and/or electrophysiology. Therefore, we suggest using sufficiently large samples when investigating associations between different levels of measurement.

Widespread attention is being paid to the alleged rise of narcissism in people in general and business leaders in particular. Surprisingly, hardly any studies have focused on the link between narcissism and entrepreneurship. Using self-reported data from 4798 respondents from three countries, we explore the associations between trait narcissism and six different entrepreneurial aspects that represent the entire entrepreneurial process. Overall, our findings suggest that a positive link exists between narcissism and entrepreneurship that is particularly salient in the early stage of the entrepreneurial process (e.g., entrepreneurial intention) and in the individual aspects of entrepreneurship (e.g., entrepreneurial orientation, well-being of the entrepreneur). Our additional analyses reveal that the adaptive aspect of narcissism (i.e., leadership/authority) is most consistently linked to entrepreneurship and that the links between narcissism and entrepreneurship are predominately linear. Finally, our findings are largely robust when different sets of controls are added.

The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 14 contributions of the special issue on the "Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses," the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the effect on entrepreneurship and small businesses; a discussion of four literature strands based on this review; an overview of the contributions in this special issue; and some ideas for post-pandemic economic research.

Studies analyzing the heritability of entrepreneurship indicate that explanations for why people engage in entrepreneurship that ignore genes are incomplete. However, despite promises that were solidly backed up with ex ante power calculations, attempts to identify specific genetic variants underlying the heritable variation in entrepreneurship have until now been unsuccessful. We describe the methodological issues hampering the identification of associations between genetic variants and entrepreneurship, but we also outline why this search will eventually be successful. Nevertheless, we argue that the benefits of using these individual genetic variants for empirical research in the entrepreneurship domain are likely to be small. Instead, the use of summary indices comprising multiple genetic variants, so-called polygenic risk scores, is advocated. In doing so, we stress the caveats associated with applying population-level results to the individual level. By drawing upon the promises of “genoeconomics,” we sketch how the use of genetic information may advance the field of entrepreneurship research.

This article presents a response to the commentary "Entrepreneurship and Contextual Definitions of Mental Disorders: Why Psychiatry Abandoned the Latter and Entrepreneurship Scholars May Want to Follow Suit"by Agafonow and Perez (2020), who commented on the AMP Entrepreneurship and Mental Health symposium. We discuss and largely challenge the commentary's criticism against the backdrop of the emerging research relating clinical psychology and mental health disorders (especially ADHD) to entrepreneurship. The aim of this response is to help scholars more clearly understand the relevance and challenges of including a (sub)clinical perspective in the study of entrepreneurial decisions, processes, and outcomes.

Although the literature on affect (i.e., the extent to which an individual subjectively experiences feelings and emotions) is burgeoning in the field of entrepreneurship, affect has not received sufficient attention with respect to an important antecedent to entrepreneurial success—entrepreneurial orientation. In this paper, we investigate the role of both positive and negative affect in entrepreneurial orientation (i.e., the strategic posture of a firm/individual with respect to innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk taking) and entrepreneurial success. The results of our analysis, based on two samples (337 Dutch sole proprietors and 254 French small business owners), show that positive affect is positively associated with entrepreneurial orientation, whereas negative affect is negatively associated with entrepreneurial orientation for sole proprietors. With respect to entrepreneurial success, results are mixed. The present study contributes to the understanding of the role of affect in entrepreneurial orientation. It also contributes to the literature on entrepreneurial success, the ultimate objective in the field of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs frequently work in highly unpredictable environments and are involved in a wide variety of tasks for which they are often ill prepared. Good mental health is of utmost importance to adequately manage the challenges, adversity, and stressors that come with running a business. However, little is known about how mental health affects entrepreneurs and the performance of their businesses. Drawing on the literature of personality and entrepreneurial exit as well as on evidence from large-scale survey data on the relation between depression and entrepreneurial exit, we show that there is ample opportunity for research investigating the relation between mental health and entrepreneurship. Five directions for future research on this topic are highlighted.

A growing conversation has emerged linking ostensibly dark or pathological individual-level characteristics to entrepreneurship. Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is among the most central and emblematic. Recent studies have made great strides—articulating the theoretical relevance of ADHD-type behavior in entrepreneurship and suggesting a positive link consistent with narratives in the popular press. However, quantitative studies have yet to empirically examine ADHD in line with its theoretical roots and definition—as a clinical disorder. The present paper contributes by providing a theoretically–empirically aligned test of the connection between the condition of ADHD and entrepreneurial intention and action. Based on a large-scale data collection effort (N = 9869) and cross-sectional methodology, the results find a positive connection between clinical ADHD and entrepreneurial intentions as well as entrepreneurial action. This grounds prior research on ADHD and entrepreneurship, indicating that individuals with ADHD are indeed more likely to not just espouse entrepreneurial intentions, but also to initiate business venturing. Considering the design, it suggests a self-selection toward entrepreneurship in individuals with ADHD (before potentially being a choice of last resort).

The absence of evidence in the scholarly literature for a tested long-term relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth is at odds with the importance attributed to entrepreneurship in the policy arena. The present paper addresses this absence, introducing entrepreneurship using four different and accepted models explaining the total factor productivity of twenty OECD countries with data for the period 1969–2010. Traditionally, entrepreneurship is not addressed in these models. We show that in all models—as well as a joint one—entrepreneurship has a significant influence while the remaining effects largely stay the same. Entrepreneurship is measured as the business ownership rate (number of business owners per workforce) corrected for the level of economic development (GDP per capita).

Our paper investigates how the type of work experience gained from prior paid employment influences the path to entrepreneurship. We distinguish between two distinct entrepreneurship entry modes: business takeover and new venture start-up. Using a large and rich French data set, we find that small firm experience increases the likelihood for business takeover, whereas management and same sector experience both increase the likelihood for new ventures. Our findings are relevant for policymakers aiming to improve the business transfer process.

textabstractThere is a small body of literature linking attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and its symptoms to entrepreneurial manifestations. Some studies take a subclinical perspective by studying the presence of symptoms, while other studies take a clinical perspective by studying the formal diagnosis of ADHD. The entrepreneurial manifestations examined range from entrepreneurial intention to the choice to become self-employed and from entrepreneurial orientation (EO) to entrepreneurial success. Despite its prominence in the entrepreneurship literature, to date only one study tested for a link with EO. The present study aims to replicate the relationship between ADHD symptoms and EO using a large data set of French small business owners. We do so by discriminating between the two dimensions of ADHD, namely attention-deficit and hyperactivity, as well as the three dimensions of EO, namely innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking. We do not find a link between ADHD and EO, although we do find a positive link between ADHD and the risk-taking subdimension of EO. Hyperactivity symptoms are positively related to EO, which is mainly driven by the subdimensions proactiveness and risk-taking. We do not find a link between attention-deficit symptoms and EO, though there is a negative link between attention-deficit and proactiveness.

Longtime close friend and colleague Roy Thurik uses this chapter to detail his relationship with David, both in and out of Academia. He tells of David being there for him during difficult times and providing invaluable advice when he needed it most. He also tells of his admiration for the man and scholar, the friend and confidante. Thurik's writing gives the reader a glimpse behind the curtain, so that one can see how highly esteemed David is as a pioneer in small business economics.

International audience; Building upon the national innovation system perspective and using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis approach (fsQCA), we propose an integrating framework to determine the conditions that lead to high levels of national innovation capability outcomes. We discriminate between five conditions, viz., building national institutions, developing human capital and research systems, improving infrastructures, and facilitating business and market conditions. We do so by analyzing data collected from the Global Innovation Index database containing 74 indicators and 133 countries between 2012 and 2015. The results show no singular path leading to high levels of innovation capability but there are three configurations of conditions. Two configurations highlight that the combination of three distinct conditions is sufficient for a country to reach a high innovation capability (one in which market conditions ‘are not necessary’ and one in which institutions ‘are not necessary’ conditions). The third configuration highlights that the combination of all five conditions is necessary for a country to reach a very high innovation capability. Some crucial implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.

Start-ups differ in the extent to which they introduce innovations to markets and, hence, in their potential contribution to society. Understanding the heterogeneous character of start-ups is key to explaining the variability in innovation. In this study, we explore whether start-ups that place more emphasis on environmental value creation versus economic value creation (‘greener start-ups’) are more innovative. We also examine how environmental regulations at the country level affect this relationship. We theorize that the fundamental difference between economic value creation (private wealth generation, i.e., self-regarding interest) and environmental value creation (environmental gains for society, i.e., other-regarding interest) influences entrepreneurial opportunity identification and exploitation. When considering the regulatory context, we draw on the innovation inducement effect of environmental regulations and expect these regulations to be most effective for entrepreneurs with a strong emphasis on economic value creation. Performing multi-level ordered logit regressions r with 2,945 start-up entrepreneurs in 31 countries (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data), we find that ‘greener start-ups’ are more likely to engage in product and process innovations. We find some evidence of a positive moderation effect for environmental regulations. We advance research on innovative entrepreneurship by theorizing and finding evidence that other-regarding goals are relevant in explaining start-up innovativeness.

Van Praag et al. (2013) analyze whether the returns to formal education in terms of income differ between entrepreneurs and employees. Using US data (1979–2000), they find that entrepreneurs have higher returns to formal education than employees. They also find evidence that the level of personal control in one’s occupation explains these higher returns. In the present study, we aim to replicate these findings using a dataset from a different country (Australia) and time period (2005–2017). Moreover, we extend the study by Van Praag et al. (2013) by distinguishing between entrepreneurs with and without employees. In accordance with Van Praag et al. (2013), we also find higher returns to education for entrepreneurs compared to employees. However, this finding mainly applies to the entrepreneurs without employees. Moreover, we do not find evidence for a mediating role of personal control in this relationship.

Entrepreneurs who start a business to serve both self-interests and collective interests by addressing unmet social and environmental needs are usually referred to as sustainable entrepreneurs. Compared with regular entrepreneurs, we argue that sustainable entrepreneurs face specific challenges when establishing their businesses owing to the discrepancy between the creation and appropriation of private value and social value. We hypothesize that when starting a business, sustainable entrepreneurs (1) feel more hampered by perceived barriers, such as the institutional environment and (2) have a different risk attitude and perception than regular entrepreneurs. We use two waves of the Flash Eurobarometer survey on entrepreneurship (2009 and 2012), which contains information on start-up motivations, start-up barriers, and risk perceptions of approximately 3000 (prospective) business owners across 33 countries. We find that sustainable entrepreneurs indeed perceive more institutional barriers in terms of a lack of financial, administrative, and informational support at business start-up than regular entrepreneurs. Further, no significant differences between sustainable and regular entrepreneurs are found in terms of their risk attitudes or perceived financial risks. However, sustainable entrepreneurs are more likely to fear personal failure than regular entrepreneurs, which is explained by their varied and complex stakeholder relations. These insights may serve as an important signal for both governments and private capital providers in enhancing the institutional climate.

International audience; The present article identifies a societal and scholarly neglect for the field of small business ownership and health. We address health capital and its spillover effects and briefly outline a research program discriminating between pathogenic (negative for health) and salutogenic (positive for health) effects for a small business owner’s working life.

This study investigates the link between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and entrepreneurial orientation (EO). EO is known to be a crucial factor for small firm survival and growth, conceptualised as a business characteristic but influenced by the personality of the small business owner and measured at her individual level. There is ample anecdotal evidence claiming that ADHD symptoms have helped entrepreneurs in their careers. Using a data set of French small firm owners, we are the first to go beyond the anecdotal level in linking ADHD symptoms and EO. Our study contributes to our understanding of entrepreneurship, particularly the determinants of EO, and to “destigmatising” ADHD, which is considered solely a clinical disorder that should be treated.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity (ADHD) symptoms have been associated with the decision to become self-employed. Although these symptoms are generally regarded as disadvantageous, there may also be a bright side. To our knowledge, however, there has been no systematic, epidemiological evidence to support this claim. This paper examines the association between ADHD symptoms and self-employment in a population-based sample from the STAGE cohort of the Swedish Twin Registry (N = 7208). For replication, we used a sample of Dutch students who participated in the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (N = 13,112). In the Swedish sample, we found a positive association with self-employment for both general ADHD symptoms [odds ratio (OR) 1.13; 95 % confidence intervals (CI) 1.04–1.23] and hyperactivity symptoms [OR 1.19; 95 % CI 1.08–1.32], whereas no association was found for attention-deficit symptoms [OR 0.99; 95 % CI 0.89–1.10]. The positive association between hyperactivity and self-employment was replicated in the Dutch student sample [OR 1.09; 95 % CI 1.03–1.15]. Our results show that certain aspects of ADHD, in particular hyperactivity, can have a bright side, as they are positively associated with self-employment.

Humans vary substantially in their willingness to take risks. In a combined sample of over one million individuals, we conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general risk tolerance, adventurousness, and risky behaviors in the driving, drinking, smoking, and sexual domains. We identified 611 approximately independent genetic loci associated with at least one of our phenotypes, including 124 with general risk tolerance. We report evidence of substantial shared genetic influences across general risk tolerance and risky behaviors: 72 of the 124 general risk tolerance loci contain a lead SNP for at least one of our other GWAS, and general risk tolerance is moderately to strongly genetically correlated (to 0.50) with a range of risky behaviors. Bioinformatics analyses imply that genes near general-risk-tolerance-associated SNPs are highly expressed in brain tissues and point to a role for glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission. We find no evidence of enrichment for genes previously hypothesized to relate to risk tolerance.

Overconfidence is one of the alleged drivers for market entry. However, establishing its effect is challenging and much of the existing entrepreneurship literature confusingly conflates overconfidence with optimism. In the present study, we use validated scales to analyze the relationship between overconfidence and two important aspects of entrepreneurship, while explicitly controlling for optimism. Specifically, we study the role of overconfidence in developing intentions about entering entrepreneurship as well as how overconfidence relates to entrepreneurial orientation. Our findings show that overconfidence is related to intended market entry but not to the market position (entrepreneurial orientation) of the business.

International audience; We investigate the interplay among entrepreneurial activity, business cycles and unemployment in relation to economic openness. Additionally, we explore to what extent the observation frequency (quarterly versus annual data) influences the estimation results. Following the empirical literature, we estimate a pooled vector autoregression (VAR) model with fixed effects for the three macroeconomic variables. Using both quarterly and annual data for 19 OECD countries for the period 1998–2007, we observe that over the short term (after one quarter), a country’s entrepreneurial activity is stimulated when its business cycle lags behind the world business cycle, whereas over the medium term (after 1 to 2 years), entrepreneurial activity is stimulated when its business cycle leads the world business cycle. This pattern suggests that a country’s business cycle position relative to the world cycle creates different types of entrepreneurial opportunities depending on the time horizon considered. These results apply only to economies that are relatively open, which suggests that economic openness plays a role in generating entrepreneurial opportunities related to a country’s cyclical performance.

A large number of epidemiological studies use genetic variants as instrumental variables to infer causal relationships. For a genetic variant to be a valid instrument in these so-called Mendelian randomization (MR) studies, three assumptions need to hold: __(i)__ the genetic variant is associated with the exposure of interest (relevance assumption); __(ii)__ the genetic variants should be independent of all confounders (independence assumption); __(iii)__ the genetic variants only effect the outcome through the exposure of interest (exclusion restriction). Without specific knowledge about the biological mechanisms affected by genetic variants, it is virtually impossible to prove that the exclusion restriction holds for a specific genetic variant. For example, genetic variants may have pleiotropic effects on both the exposure and the outcome through different biological pathways. [...]

The self-employed are often reported to be healthier than wageworkers; however, the cause of this health difference is largely unknown. The longitudinal nature of the US Health and Retirement Study allows us to gauge the plausibility of two competing explanations for this difference: a contextual effect of self-employment on health (benefit effect), or a health-related selection of individuals into self-employment (barrier effect). Our main finding is that the selection of comparatively healthier individuals into self-employment accounts for the positive cross-sectional difference. The results rule out a positive contextual effect of self-employment on health, and we present tentative evidence that, if anything, engaging in self-employment is bad for one's health. Given the importance of the self-employed in the economy, these findings contribute to our understanding of the vitality of the labor force. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The American Psychiatric Association estimates that 3 to 7 per cent of all school aged children are diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Even after correcting for general cognitive ability, numerous studies report a negative association between ADHD and educational achievement. With polygenic scores we examined whether genetic variants that have a positive influence on educational attainment have a protective effect against ADHD. The effect sizes from a large GWA meta-analysis of educational attainment in adults were used to calculate polygenic scores in an independent sample of 12-year-old children from the Netherlands Twin Register. Linear mixed models showed that the polygenic scores significantly predicted educational achievement, school performance, ADHD symptoms and attention problems in children. These results confirm the genetic overlap between ADHD and educational achievement, indicating that one way to gain insight into genetic variants responsible for variation in ADHD is to include data on educational achievement, which are available at a larger scale. (C) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Entrepreneurship has a cyclical component, raising two questions. Is the entrepreneurship cycle related to the business cycle? And is there causality? A two-way relationship between entrepreneurship and the business cycle would be in line with the two faces of entrepreneurs: as agents of change creating upswings (opportunity entrepreneurship) and as rational actors escaping unemployment by setting up a business (necessity entrepreneurship). Nascent entrepreneurship can indeed be precyclical, implying that the two faces of entrepreneurship also show up in the business cycle, with promising policy implications.

Whereas the determinants of entrepreneurial choice have been thoroughly analyzed in the literature, little is known about the preferred mode of entry into entrepreneurship, such as taking over an existing business or starting a new venture. Using a large international data set, this study reports considerable differences in takeover preferences across 33 countries. Hierarchical (multilevel) regressions are performed to explore individual–level and country–level determinants of the preferred mode of entry. At the individual level, a person's human capital, risk attitude, and inventiveness influence the preference for starting a new venture versus taking over an existing business. At the country level, the culture–inherent level of risk tolerance, the country's level of innovation output, and the administrative difficulty of starting a new business are found to explain the between–country variation in the preferred mode of entry. Implications of our findings for research and practice are also discussed.