The effect of early entrepreneurship education: Evidence from a field experiment

Laura Rosendahl Huber*, Randolph Sloof, Mirjam Van Praag

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of early entrepreneurship education. To this end, we conduct a randomized field experiment to evaluate a leading entrepreneurship education program that is taught worldwide in the final grade of primary school. We focus on pupils' development of entrepreneurship knowledge and a set of non-cognitive skills relevant for entrepreneurial activity. The results indicate that knowledge is unaffected by the program. However, the program has a robust positive effect on non-cognitive entrepreneurial skills. This is surprising since previous evaluations found zero or negative effects. Because these earlier studies all pertain to entrepreneurship education for adolescents, our result tentatively suggests that non-cognitive entrepreneurial skills are best developed at an early age. As the entrepreneurship program has various features besides its entrepreneurship content, we must leave it to future research to determine which specific element has the greatest impact on the development of non-cognitive entrepreneurial skills.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)76-97
Number of pages22
JournalEuropean Economic Review
Volume72
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2014
Externally publishedYes

Funding

This research was supported by the Amsterdam Center for Entrepreneurship . We would like to thank an associate editor and two anonymous referees for very useful comments and suggestions. We also thank Julie Cullen, and seminar audiences at the University of Amsterdam, the Tinbergen Institute, University of Valencia, IUI Stockholm, IST/IN+ Lisbon, Ivey Business School, University of Groningen and the IZA Workshop on Entrepreneurship Research for helpful comments. Appendix A Table A1-A6. Appendix B

Keywords

  • Entrepreneurship
  • Entrepreneurship education
  • Field experiment
  • Skill formation
  • Teamwork

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