From entry to persistence: Socio-emotional skills and entrepreneurial profiles

IF 1.4 3区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics Pub Date : 2026-03-01 Epub Date: 2026-02-03 DOI:10.1016/j.socec.2026.102519

Kompal Sinha , Elisabetta Magnani , Rong Zhu

{"title":"From entry to persistence: Socio-emotional skills and entrepreneurial profiles","authors":"Kompal Sinha , Elisabetta Magnani , Rong Zhu","doi":"10.1016/j.socec.2026.102519","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates how a comprehensive set of socio-emotional skills (the Big Five personality traits, locus of control, risk preference, time preference, and trust) shapes not only the decision to enter entrepreneurship, as measured by self-employment and incorporated self-employment, but also informs individuals’ ability to sustain the entrepreneurial state over time. Drawing on longitudinal data from the Australian HILDA Survey, we introduce two time-sensitive indices to measure entrepreneurship, chronicity and persistence, alongside conventional static measures of self-employment and incorporated self-employment. Results show that risk preference consistently emerges as the strongest predictor of entrepreneurial entry and persistence, while the roles of other socio-emotional traits are smaller and less consistent. Heterogeneity analyses suggest these results offer important caveats on the gender dimension of entrepreneurship. These findings remain robust under extensive sensitivity and bounds tests, underscoring the central role of risk preference in sustaining entrepreneurial activity.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51637,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 102519"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221480432600011X","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2026/2/3 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This study investigates how a comprehensive set of socio-emotional skills (the Big Five personality traits, locus of control, risk preference, time preference, and trust) shapes not only the decision to enter entrepreneurship, as measured by self-employment and incorporated self-employment, but also informs individuals’ ability to sustain the entrepreneurial state over time. Drawing on longitudinal data from the Australian HILDA Survey, we introduce two time-sensitive indices to measure entrepreneurship, chronicity and persistence, alongside conventional static measures of self-employment and incorporated self-employment. Results show that risk preference consistently emerges as the strongest predictor of entrepreneurial entry and persistence, while the roles of other socio-emotional traits are smaller and less consistent. Heterogeneity analyses suggest these results offer important caveats on the gender dimension of entrepreneurship. These findings remain robust under extensive sensitivity and bounds tests, underscoring the central role of risk preference in sustaining entrepreneurial activity.

查看原文本刊更多论文

从入门到坚持：社会情感技能和创业概况

本研究调查了一套全面的社会情感技能（五大人格特征、控制点、风险偏好、时间偏好和信任）如何不仅影响了个体创业的决定，还影响了个体在一段时间内维持创业状态的能力。根据澳大利亚HILDA调查的纵向数据，我们引入了两个时间敏感指数来衡量企业家精神、长期性和持久性，以及传统的自雇和合并自雇的静态指标。结果表明，风险偏好始终是创业进入和坚持的最强预测因子，而其他社会情感特征的作用较小且不太一致。异质性分析表明，这些结果为创业的性别维度提供了重要的警告。在广泛的敏感性和界限检验下，这些发现仍然是强有力的，强调了风险偏好在维持创业活动中的核心作用。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

2.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

113

审稿时长

83 days

期刊介绍： The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly the Journal of Socio-Economics) welcomes submissions that deal with various economic topics but also involve issues that are related to other social sciences, especially psychology, or use experimental methods of inquiry. Thus, contributions in behavioral economics, experimental economics, economic psychology, and judgment and decision making are especially welcome. The journal is open to different research methodologies, as long as they are relevant to the topic and employed rigorously. Possible methodologies include, for example, experiments, surveys, empirical work, theoretical models, meta-analyses, case studies, and simulation-based analyses. Literature reviews that integrate findings from many studies are also welcome, but they should synthesize the literature in a useful manner and provide substantial contribution beyond what the reader could get by simply reading the abstracts of the cited papers. In empirical work, it is important that the results are not only statistically significant but also economically significant. A high contribution-to-length ratio is expected from published articles and therefore papers should not be unnecessarily long, and short articles are welcome. Articles should be written in a manner that is intelligible to our generalist readership. Book reviews are generally solicited but occasionally unsolicited reviews will also be published. Contact the Book Review Editor for related inquiries.