Who succeeds as an entrepreneur? An analysis of the post-entry performance of new firms in Japan

Using a dataset of 5911 new Japanese firms, this paper examines whether the probability of an entrepreneur's success is related to the entrepreneur's human capital and gender, and the initial size of the firm. We propose three economic performance measures indicating an entrepreneur's success, and estimate probit models to investigate their determinants. The empirical evidence suggests that an entrepreneur's related business experience before start-up, and initial firm size tend to be positively related to the probability of success, while an entrepreneur's age and the female dummy are negatively related. The negative effect of age contradicts Cressy's (1996) human capital hypothesis. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.