Self-Employment Wealth and Job Creation: The Roles of Gender, Non-pecuniary Motivation and Entrepreneurial Ability

This paper uses National Child Development Study data for a large cohort of British individuals, to explore the influence of education, inheritance and other background characteristics on the propensity to become self-employed; and also on subsequent success, as measured by job and wealth creation. For the first time, we study the effects of our regressor variables on our success measures via disaggregation of our sample by gender - and, in this way, reveal striking differences between the determinants of male and female entrepreneurial performance.