Does Career Risk Deter Potential Entrepreneurs?

Previously circulated as "Experimenting with Entrepreneurship: The Effect of Job-Protected Leave." We are grateful to Francesca Cornelli (the editor), two anonymous referees, Paul Beaudry, Shai Bernstein, Ing-Haw Cheng, Gordon Dahl, Thomas Hellmann, Kai Li, Ben Lockwood, Gustavo Manso, Kevin Milligan, Will Mullins, Ramana Nanda, Carolin Pflueger, Matt Rhodes-Kropf, David Robinson, Elena Simintzi, conference and seminar participants at AEA, AFA, Caltech/USC, NBER Corporate Finance, NBER Entrepreneurship, MFA, Stanford, UBC, UC Chile, HKU, HKUST, CityU of HK, and Tsinghua SEM, and especially our discussants Jeanne Lafortune, Adrien Matray, John Mondragon, Paige Ouimet, Joshua Rauh, Antoinette Schoar, and Christopher Stanton for valuable comments. Gottlieb thanks the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for their hospitality while working on this project, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for support. We are indebted to Statistics Canada, SSHRC, and the staff at the British Columbia Interuniversity Research Data Centre at UBC for facilitating data access and Hugh Shiplett for excellent research assistance. The research and analysis are based on data from Statistics Canada and the opinions expressed do not represent the views of Statistics Canada, nor do they necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• July 21, 2016
• July 25, 2018