The long run gender origins of entrepreneurship: Evidence from Australia's convict history

Abstract

This paper explores the long-run gender origins of entrepreneurship. We argue that present-day propensity for entrepreneurship among men will be higher in neighbourhoods which had historically high sex ratios. We propose that high sex ratios generate attitudes and behaviours that imprint into cultural norms about gender roles and that transmission within families, at school and via shared remembrance create hysteresis in the evolution of these gender norms. To empirically test the theory, we employ the transport of convicts to the British colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a natural experiment to examine the long-run effect of cultural norms about gender roles on entrepreneurship in present-day Australia. We use a representative longitudinal dataset for the Australian population that provides information on the neighbourhood in which the participant lives, which we merge with data on the sex ratio in historical counties from the mid-nineteenth century. We find that men who live in neighbourhoods that had high historical sex ratios have a higher propensity for entrepreneurship. We present evidence consistent with transmission of cultural norms within families and schools, as well as via shared remembrance in neighbourhoods that had high historical sex ratios being likely persistence mechanisms.