TY  - JOUR
A1  - Caliendo, Marco
A1  - Fossen, Frank M.
A1  - Kritikos, Alexander
T1  - Personality characteristics and the decision to hire
JF  - Industrial and corporate change
N2  - As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to understand whether the personality of entrepreneurs drives the first hiring in their firms. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we analyze to what extent personality traits influence the probability of becoming an employer. The results indicate that personality matters. Risk tolerance unfolds the strongest influence on hiring, shortening the time until entrepreneurs hire their first employee; the effect size of a one-standard-deviation increase in risk tolerance is similar to that of having a university degree. Moreover, individuals who are more open to experience, more conscientious, and more trustful are more likely to hire upon establishing their business.
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dtab062
SN  - 0960-6491
SN  - 1464-3650
VL  - 31
IS  - 3
SP  - 736
EP  - 761
PB  - Oxford University Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Belitski, Maksim
A1  - Guenther, Christina
A1  - Kritikos, Alexander
A1  - Thurik, Adriaan R.
T1  - Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses
JF  - Small business economics
N2  - The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 15 contributions of the special issue on the “Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses,” the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the effect on entrepreneurship and small businesses; a discussion of four literature strands based on this review; an overview of the contributions in this special issue; and some ideas for post-pandemic economic research.
KW  - small businesses
KW  - entrepreneurs
KW  - COVID-19 pandemic
KW  - economic effects
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-021-00544-y
SN  - 0921-898X
SN  - 1573-0913
VL  - 58
IS  - 2
SP  - 593
EP  - 609
PB  - Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
CY  - Dordrecht
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Graeber, Daniel
A1  - Kritikos, Alexander
A1  - Seebauer, Johannes
T1  - COVID-19
BT  - a crisis of the female self-employed
JF  - Journal of population economics
N2  - We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed — particularly women — in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher likelihood of income losses due to COVID-19 than employees, women are about one-third more likely to experience income losses than their male counterparts. We do not find a comparable gender gap among employees. Our results further suggest that the gender gap among the self-employed is largely explained by the fact that women disproportionately work in industries that are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis of potential mechanisms reveals that women are significantly more likely to be impacted by government-imposed restrictions, e.g., the regulation of opening hours. We conclude that future policy measures intending to mitigate the consequences of such shocks should account for this considerable variation in economic hardship.
KW  - self-employed
KW  - COVID-19
KW  - income
KW  - gender
KW  - representative real-time survey data
KW  - decomposition methods
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-021-00849-y
SN  - 0933-1433
SN  - 1432-1475
VL  - 34
IS  - 4
SP  - 1141
EP  - 1187
PB  - Springer
CY  - Berlin
ER  -