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%T Are Nascent Entrepreneurs Jacks-of-all-trades? A Test of Lazear's Theory of Entrepreneurship with German Data* %A Wagner, Joachim %J Applied Economics %N 20 %P 2415-2419 %V 38 %D 2006 %= 2011-04-01T03:09:00Z %~ http://www.peerproject.eu/ %> https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-239384 %X Abstract: In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the jack-of-all-trades view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. The intuition behind this proposition is that entrepreneurs must have sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to put together the many ingredients needed for survival and success in a business, while for paid employees it suffices and pays to be a specialist in the field demanded by the job taken. This paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing Lazear's hypothesis using a large recent representative sample of the German population. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of becoming a nascent entrepreneur and the regional stratification of the sample into account. The results illustrate the statistical significance and economic importance of the jack-of-all-trades theory. %G en %9 journal article %W GESIS - http://www.gesis.org %~ SSOAR - http://www.ssoar.info