Talent workers as entrepreneurs: a new approach to aspirational self-employment

Using the concept of the so-called talent workers (Hsieh et al. 2016), we ask what the link is between wage employment as a talent worker and subsequent establishing of business. Individuals with tertiary education and experience in specific occupations are in principle more likely to develop or adopt innovations necessary for entrepreneurial success. We employ over a decade worth of individual level data on changes in labour market status for Poland – a country with high levels of self-employment, and analyse transitions to self-employment as opposed to switching a job. We find that talent workers are more likely to become self-employed than to change a job and the odds of creating more jobs are higher among talent workers who switch to self-employment than among other groups of workers who become self-employed. These results are robust to two possibly confounding effects – within-sector mobility and higher productivity of workers before entering self-employment.