Socio-Historical Shifts in Life Stage at Entrepreneurial Entry and Their Performance Implications

Entrepreneurs are no longer who and what they used to be, and this has implications for entrepreneurial performance. Drawing on life course theory and results from cohort analyses of U.S. self-employment data from the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we propose that shifting age norms have resulted in individuals today entering entrepreneurship at a younger age, and with less prior work experience than in the past. Also, individuals today are more frequently unmarried and childless at the time of entering entrepreneurship. We conjecture that these socio-historical shifts in life stage at entrepreneurial entry bear largely negative implications for entrepreneurial performance. Moreover, we argue for gender differences in the effect of parenthood on entrepreneurial performance, which we suggest have decreased over time due to the decline of traditional gender roles. Our cohort analyses support these theoretical conjectures.