Entrepreneurship and immigration: evidence from GEM Luxembourg

This study analyses the role of immigration background and education in creating new business initiatives in Luxembourg, a country where 44 % of the resident population is immigrant. We investigate the features of entrepreneurs and of the Luxembourgish System of Entrepreneurship using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitoring surveys of 2013 and 2014. We study the effect of immigration through all the stages of entrepreneurial process: interest in starting a new business, effectively starting, running a new business and managing an established business. We adopt a sequential logit to model entrepreneurial process as a sequence of stages. We find that first-generation immigrants, and in particular highly educated ones, are more interested in starting a new business than non-immigrants, but they do not differ in subsequent entrepreneurial phases. We argue that policies to attract highly educated immigrants can promote entrepreneurial initiatives in Luxembourg.