From sibship to entrepreneurship: an intragenerational perspective on entrepreneurial intention and action

Abstract

People’s entrepreneurial intention and action largely depend on their development and acquisition of entrepreneurial capital, including human, social, and financial capital. Extant research has adopted an intergenerational perspective, emphasizing that entrepreneurial capital can be transferred from parents and grandparents to offspring. We advance this literature by introducing an intragenerational perspective and arguing that siblings affect one’s development and acquisition of entrepreneurial capital. Siblings enhance social capital development through mutual learning, hinder human capital development because parental resource dilution harms cognitive advancement, and facilitate financial capital acquisition via lending and co-funding. In combination, these effects result in an inverted U-shaped relationship between sibship size and entrepreneurial intention and a positive and concave relationship between sibship size and entrepreneurial action. We also argue that men obtain more combined entrepreneurial capital from siblings than do women due to their parents’ son preference, shifting the inflection points of these curved relationships to the right for men. We analyze data on 6,048 individuals (16–60 years old) and find general evidence for these notions.