Entrepreneurship in Norway: Dynamics, barriers and outcomes

The first aim is to arrive at an improved and empirically feasible definition of entrepreneurship that ensures consistency between the definition of the entrepreneurial firm and the entrepreneur. The starting point for our definition is as an owner-manage r in a closely held firm. The project will combine information on individuals and firms from a number of administrative registers, and we will construct two longitudinal databases of entrepreneurs, one firm-based and one individual-based, which will be ma de accessible to the research community afterwards. In a descriptive analysis we establish the stylized facts about entrepreneurship in Norway with emphasis on the gender perspective, and compare with alternative definitions and previous findings. We then proceed to empirical analyses of selected topics. Most start-up finance tends to be supplied by the entrepreneurs themselves or by the family, due to scarce supply of risk capital. After the start-up period, firms will typically rely on internal funds t o fill any gap between cash requirements and external funds. We examine how household composition and household income structure affects entrepreneurship, and whether these effects are symmetric between men and women. We also examine how the financing of entrepreneurial firms develops over their life-time. The economic returns to entrepreneurship is analyzed within a particular returns to schooling-estimation framework, where experience, years of schooling and the choice to become an entrepreneur are endo genous. The model allows for correlation of unobserved effects that govern these choices and earnings. The final part of the project analyzes to what extent starting a business involves changes in the labour market participation of the partner, how the ti ming of the business set-up is related to the family life-stage and age of children, and whether there are differences between female and male entrepreneurs in these respects.