Abstract
Literature on the formation of intention toward entrepreneurship in adolescents has focused on either parental (vertical) transmission of social capital or network effects from peers or neighbors (horizontal). Considering the simultaneous effect of parents, peers, and neighbors, we suggest that such three levels identify a mechanism whereby the individual perception of their importance interacts with their objective characteristics. With a unique dataset for second-year high-school adolescents in the Italian city of Palermo, and employing Logit and 3SLS methods, we find evidence for a strong parental effect and for secondary peer (peers) effects on student intention. We also detect clear endogenous effects from the neighborhood and the overall context. Moreover, entrepreneurship is confirmed to be perceived, even by high-school students, as a buffer for possible unemployment and social mobility.
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Notes
The publicly-supported school grades prior to college in the US.
Certificates of government funding for a student at a school chosen by the student herself or by her parents.
Such as one’s household income etc., as we know higher poverty is associated with higher reliance on extended family and social networks.
Palermo is the capital city of the region of Sicily. In 2017, it had a resident population of 673,735 inhabitants and an unemployment rate of 21.3%, almost twice as big as the national average (10.9%). The data collection was implemented by the University of Palermo as part of the national project ‘Social and Spatial Interactions in the Accumulation of Civic and Human Capital’, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research under the call Futuro in Ricerca 2012. For further details, refer to Fazio et al. (2016, 2018).
A list of all questions is available from the authors upon request.
We carried out variance inflation factor (VIF) tests as well (not reported), which showed that no relevant multicollinearity issues concerning the three contextual level variables exist in an OLS regression setting.
We tested the possibility of instrumenting the ‘uncertainty’ variable with family- and peers-specific human capital, which are standard instruments for modeling vertical transmission. However, 2SLS results suggested that these instruments were weak. Consequently, no evidence based on 2SLS is presented here.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Giorgio Fazio (University of Palermo) for allowing us to use the survey data, and Enza Maltese (Italian Court of Audit) for her assistance in dealing with them. We are grateful, for useful comments, to two anonymous referees, Marcus Dejardin, Michael Frese, Michael Fritsch, Katrin Hussinger, Elisabeth Müller, Kristina Nyström, and participants to: the Workshop on Entrepreneurship and Happy Citizens; the 3rd International Conference on the Dynamics of Entrepreneurship; the Fifth International Workshop on Entrepreneurship, Culture, Finance and Economic Development; the 56th ERSA Congress; the Workshop on Social and Spatial Interactions in the Accumulation of Civic and Human Capital; the 2018 Rimini Conference in Economics and Finance; the 22nd Uddevalla Symposium; the 4th Workshop on Spatial Dimensions of the Labour Market; seminars held at the University of Bologna (Department of Economics and Centre for Advanced Studies in Tourism). The usual disclaimers apply.
Funding
This study was supported by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (“Futuro in Ricerca 2012” Grant number RBFR1269HZ_003); the University of Bologna (FARB Grant number FFBO127034); and Uni.Rimini (Project “Creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship—2016”).
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PATUELLI, R., SANTARELLI, E. & TUBADJI, A. Entrepreneurial intention among high-school students: the importance of parents, peers and neighbors. Eurasian Bus Rev 10, 225–251 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40821-020-00160-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40821-020-00160-y