Abstract
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.
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Notes
Ethnic enclaves can be defined as self-contained minority communities nested in metropolitan areas (Wilson and Martin 1982).
In a well-known study, Wilson and Portes (1980) found that Cuban immigrants working for Cuban employers in Miami experienced significant returns to their human capital.
Luxembourg en chiffres, STATEC, 2014 can be found on: http://www.statistiques.public.lu/en/publications/series/lux-figures/index.html.
On labour force statistics in Luxembourg, one can see data and publications on STATEC’s website, in particular http://www.statistiques.public.lu/en/population-employment/index.html. One can also see the various issues of the Rapport travail et cohésion sociale, published regularly by STATEC.
In six other European countries—namely, Cyprus, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland and Belgium—people with an immigration background will account for more than 30 % of the resident population.
For example, questionnaire provides information about the sector of economic activity only after the starting of the new venture. Therefore, only the last two phases include these controls.
Model estimates are available upon request from the authors.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the participants to the “Conference of National Systems of Entrepreneurship” held in Mannheim on 20–21 November 2014 and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.
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Peroni, C., Riillo, C.A.F. & Sarracino, F. Entrepreneurship and immigration: evidence from GEM Luxembourg. Small Bus Econ 46, 639–656 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-016-9708-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-016-9708-y