Entrepreneurial skills, trust and jobsthree essays on entrepreneurial skills of self-employed and employees

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6 7 Summary This thesis is an empirical study that sets out to explain entrepreneurial activity, based on a broad concept of entrepreneurship. The study is based on the development of logistic regression models for a dichotomous variable of entrepreneurship, which we attempt to explain, always working from observational data from third party sources, basically GEM and REFLEX. In the course of the thesis, we set out to explain entrepreneurial activity, starting with an initial approach that looks at institutional context and moving immediately to a second approach based on human capital. The study also incorporates both a closed-spectrum concept associated with self-employment as an occupational choice and a broad concept based on the behavioural approach, in other words, on the entrepreneur as an agent of change in an economic environment based on innovation. Thus in the first chapter entrepreneurship is explained at a micro level, based on the GEM study, which places particular emphasis on the type of context that favours this activity, in other words, considering the institutional environment as an asset that potentially acts as a facilitator of entrepreneurial activity. To implement this first empirical approach we use levels of trust at various levels within institutions, establishing a parallel with the institutional theory of NIE (O. Williamson). We succeed in showing the influence of the institutional environment at various levels, with robust results in each of the different models employed. With this first finding, our next aim was to explain entrepreneurship in the broader sense, by observing the entrepreneur as an agent of change, or intrapreneur. In this case, the REFLEX study offers a database focused on university students, which provides information about occupation, skills and career path, and which constitutes a good starting point from which to explain intrapreneurship, looking at a group of individuals and taking as a variable specific entrepreneurial skills. We succeed in showing the relevance of alertness in an explanation of corporate entrepreneurship, in a model within which different variables, such as company size or academic spheres, have been used, adding robustness to the model. Our reference, in this case, has been Kirzner’s work. Finally, in the concluding part of the study, we maintain our focus on human capital and once more take a more restrictive definition of the dependent variable with the aim of focusing on entrepreneurship as self-employment. Again, in this case, we make use of the REFLEX database, focusing on entrepreneurship training to empirically prove the jack-of-all-trades 8 theory (Lazear) as it relates to the balancing of multiple skills as the decisive factor in the explanation of entrepreneurship. This study offers a succinct tour of current topics in the academic community working on entrepreneurship, contributing to the creation of knowledge that is useful both at an academic level and in supporting the design and implementation of policies for economic growth that are based on entrepreneurial activity.