Three essays on entrepreneurship in a developing country: the case of Mexico

• Autores: Ivette Fuentes Molina
• Directores de la Tesis: José María Raya Vílchez (dir. tes.), Esther Martínez García (codir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat de Girona ( España ) en 2015
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Daniel A. Tirado Fabregat (presid.), José Ignacio Silva Becerra (secret.), Monserrat Vilalta Bufí (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Ciencias económicas
    • Economía internacional
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• Resumen

  • This thesis studies entrepreneurship in Mexico. The first chapter analyses the determinants of entrepreneurship in Mexico in the long term (1940-2010). We use a panel data model on seven waves from Mexico´s Census data for all 32 Mexican states from INEGI -Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática- (National Institute of Statistics and Geography). The analysis distinguishes and compares entrepreneurs defined as employers (with at least one employee), the own-account (without employees) and the sum of both, referred to as self-employed. We discuss the determinants of entrepreneurship at the macroeconomic level, particularly levels of human capital and socio-economic characteristics. The results of the first chapter reveal that the significant coefficients for the Mexican self-employed in general correspond to the coefficients which are significant for the own-account, but none of these coefficients show significant values for employers. These matches can be observed in the variables related to primary education, Protestant religion and ownership. In Chapter 2, using micro data sample from Mexican Census of Population and Housing 2010 (CPV 2010), we study the likelihood of being an entrepreneur in the tourism sector. We introduce to the analysis the informal economy in order to measure its importance in the decision of being an entrepreneur. We employ a standard logit model with a series of explanatory variables introduced in a sequential way in a model-building strategy. Our findings show that working in the informal economy in the tourism sector is particularly beneficial for married women. We observe that higher levels of education increase the likelihood of being an entrepreneur in all our models. Adding up controls does not alter the effect of higher human capital on the probability to enterprise. Finally, in the third chapter we investigate the determinants of entrepreneurship in Mexico. We use a cross section wave from Mexican CPV 2010. The model features simultaneous determination of employment status based on choice-theoretic considerations. In order to correct the self-selection of women into employment, we introduce inverse Mills ratios conditioning the presence of women in the labor force on their having children. Results show negative sign on the entrepreneur–employee women differential which implies that female choose self-employed status even though they are predicted to earn less than they could as employees. We observe that there are clear and identifiable differences between male and female entrepreneurs in terms of their respective endowments of human capital and their effects in the probability of being entrepreneur.