Three essays on hard skills, soft skills, risk attitudes and entrepreneurship
- Autores: John Enrique Correa Pinzón
- Directores de la Tesis: José Ignacio Silva Becerra (dir. tes.), Aleksander Kucel (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat de Girona ( España ) en 2022
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Àngels Xabadia Palmada (presid.), Vahagn Jerbashian (secret.), Henry Ali Aray Casanova (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Derecho, Economía y Empresa por la Universidad de Girona y la Universidad de Vic-Universidad Central de Catalunya
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
This thesis studies the effects of hard skills and soft skills and risk attitudes on the likelihood of starting a company in the US. Hard skills are those skills that can be learned and trained. They are cognitive in nature. For example, a course in accounting will strengthen this hard skill in an individual. Soft skills are all those characteristics of the individual's character. They have to do with personality traits. Creativity, emotional stability or extraversion are some examples of soft skills. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 cohort (NLSY97). This is a panel data, which interviewed around 9000 individuals in 1997 when they were between 12 and 17. NLSY provides a unique set of variables, which allow us to directly measure the cognitive skills of individuals in the panel through Armed Service Vocational Aptitude Battery test (ASVAB). The soft skills are measured through the big five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We work with the first 17 waves of the NLSY97 survey.
The first chapter of the thesis extracts the pure effect of the big five personality traits by interacting them with the three terciles of ASVAB. This way, we are able to estimate the effects of personality traits across the distribution of cognitive ability. Results show that there is not a universal personality traits that matter across the cognitive ability distribution. Openness to experience that is to be intellectually curious and interested in new experiences significantly increases the probability of starting a company at the bottom and top of the distribution. Conscientiousness that is to be self-disciplined also increases the probability, but for those at the middle of the distribution .
The second chapter elicits the differences between different terciles of cognitive capacity and the risk attitudes towards starting a company. We split risk attitudes and personality traits to observe if there are significant differences across the cognitive skills distribution for each of them separately. Results demonstrate that risk loving in general and work are the key domains that affect the probability of starting a new venture.
Finally, the third chapter provides a more comprehensive view of the probability to start a company in the NLSY97 sample. We continue including the interaction with the three terciles of cognitive ability. However, we also distinguish between novel entrepreneurs who just created their first firm; serial entrepreneurs, who have previously created other firms and now create another one while no longer running any of the previous; and portfolio entrepreneurs who have previously started other ventures and are now creating another one while still running the previous firms. All these categories we compare to employees in a multinomial logit model for panel data. Results of this chapter confirm that openness to experience increases the likelihood of starting a firm for the first time, but in this case only for individuals in the lowest tercile. Agreeableness increases the odds in the lower and middle terciles of cognitive ability. For serial entrepreneurs, openness to experience matters only for higher terciles of cognitive ability. Extraversion also increases the likelihood for the individuals in the first tercile of cognitive ability. Moreover, for portfolio entrepreneurs, self-discipline (conscientiousness) is important for the lowest tercile, as well as openness to experience. These results indicate that it is complex to speak of universal characteristics for entrepreneurship, as there are variations depending on the cognitive level of individuals.
