Little is currently known about the effects of skill composition on academic entrepreneurship. Therefore, in this paper, following Lazear’s (J Labor Econ 23(4):649–680, 2005) jack-of-all-trades approach, we study how the composition of a scientist’s skills affects his or her intention to become an entrepreneur. Extending Lazear, we examine how the effect of balanced skills is moderated by a balance in working time and peer effects. Using unique data collected from 480 life sciences researchers in Switzerland and Germany, we provide first evidence that scientists with more diverse and balanced skills are more likely to have higher entrepreneurial intentions, but only if they also balance their working time and are in contact with entrepreneurial peers. Therefore, to encourage the entrepreneurial intentions of life scientists, it must be ensured that scientists are exposed to several types of work experience, have balanced working time allocations across different activities, and work with entrepreneurial peers; e.g., collaborating with colleagues or academic scientists who have started new ventures in the past.
This paper analyzes whether effort provision in entrepreneurial teams depends on the size of the team, assuming that size determines the strength of free-riding and peer pressure effects in entrepreneurial teams. We provide a theoretical model and empirical analyses to explain the joint effect of free-riding and peer pressure on effort in start-up teams. We begin with an economic model by Kandel and Lazear in J Polit Econ 100(4):801–817, (1992) and enrich it using insights from entrepreneurship research. Based on our model, we first hypothesize that with increasing team size in entrepreneurial teams, the efforts of the individual team founders should follow an inverted U-shaped pattern. Second, we argue that the peer pressure effect is stronger if team members have stronger social ties, and thus we expect the effort-maximizing team size to be larger in teams with stronger social ties. Using a data set from 214 German start-up teams, we find that our hypotheses are supported by the data.
Although previous literature has found substantial differences between female and male workers in almost all labor market outcomes, the question of whether training participation differs between female and male part-time workers has been neglected. This article provides a novel examination of whether the part-time training gap is gender-dependent. Using a Swiss dataset, we find that men engaged in part-time employment suffer from a serious training disadvantage in comparison to men working full-time and that this effect is not found for women. Thus, in countries where part-time participation levels differ significantly between men and women, part-time employment is a “bane” to men but not to women. Women, however, “pay the price” merely by virtue of being female.
