Entrepreneurship and subjective well-being: Does the motivation to start-up a firm matter?

José Ernesto Amorós, Oscar Cristi and Wim Naudé

Journal of Business Research, 2021, vol. 127, issue C, 389-398

Abstract: Although there have been many studies on the subjective well-being of entrepreneurs, these have compared entrepreneurs’ well-being with those of non-entrepreneurs, or with economic and firm performance, or attempted to identify the determinants their subjective well-being. So far there have been only limited attempts to compare the subjective well-being of differently motivated entrepreneurs. This paper is an attempt to contribute filling this gap. We explore the relationship between the motivation for entering into entrepreneurship and subjective well-being. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor in 70 countries covering 159,274 individuals. Using a two-stage probit least squares estimator to test the relationship between motivation and subjective well-being, with particular concern for the direction of causality, we find that necessity-motivated entrepreneurs report well-being levels similar to opportunity-motivated entrepreneurs. We also find that in countries where necessity entrepreneurship is more prevalent (typically developing countries), lower rates of entrepreneurial entry will be associated with higher reported subjective well-being of the necessity-motivated entrepreneurs. The upshot of our findings is that entrepreneurship, even if motivated by necessity, contributes to subjective well-being.

Keywords: Well-being; Necessity-driven entrepreneurship; Motivation; Global Entrepreneurship Monitor; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296320307979
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:127:y:2021:i:c:p:389-398

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.11.044

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().