In the beginning, there is the wage-earner...

Abstract

Why do so many small businesses stay small? The usual answers to this question are the size of their market, the capabilities of their leaders, economic institutions, regulations, and government interference. This paper introduces another explanation based on the biography of the entrepreneurs. It separates entrepreneurs into three groups: those who created their business because they could not find a salaried job, those who wanted to escape the discipline and rules of large firms, and those who seized a business opportunity while working in a large company. Only the entrepreneurs belonging to this last category have the ambition and, usually, the means to build growing firms.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.