• Graduate Education
  • Research
  • Browse our Courses
  • Events
    • Events Calendar
    • Events Archive
    • Summer School
      • Applied Public Policy Evaluation
      • Deep Learning
      • Development Economics
      • Economics of Blockchain and Digital Currencies
      • Economics of Climate Change
      • The Economics of Crime
      • Foundations of Machine Learning with Applications in Python
      • From Preference to Choice: The Economic Theory of Decision-Making
      • Inequalities in Health and Healthcare
      • Marketing Research with Purpose
      • Markets with Frictions
      • Modern Toolbox for Spatial and Functional Data
      • Sustainable Finance
      • Tuition Fees and Payment
      • Business Data Science Summer School Program
    • Tinbergen Institute Lectures
    • 2026 Tinbergen Institute Opening Conference
    • Annual Tinbergen Institute Conference
  • News
  • Alumni

Lindquist, MatthewJ., Sol, J. and Van Praag, M. (2015). Why do entrepreneurial parents have entrepreneurial children? Journal of Labor Economics, 33(2):269--296.


  • Journal
    Journal of Labor Economics

We explore the origins of the intergenerational association in en-trepreneurship using Swedish adoption data that allow us to quantify the relative importance of prebirth and postbirth factors. We find that parental entrepreneurship increases the probability of children{\textquoteright}s entrepreneurship by about 60%. For adoptees, both biological and adoptive parents make significant contributions to this association. These contributions, however, are quite different in size. Postbirth factors account for twice as much as prebirth factors in our decomposition of the intergenerational association in entrepre-neurship. We investigate several candidate explanations for this large postbirth factor and present suggestive evidence infavorofrole modeling.