Starting a Family Business as a Career Option: The Role of the Family Household in Mexico

Abstract This study analyses the determinants of an individual’s intention to start up a new venture that involves family members. Building on the family embeddedness perspective, we hypothesize the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of individuals in a family household and the intention to start a family business. Moreover, we argue that this relationship is moderated by the household income and the individual’s education level. With supportive empirical results based on data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) from Mexico, our work contributes to research on family embeddedness and entrepreneurial career intentions by identifying the importance of household-level factors in the family business start-up decision, and by depicting such decision as a distinctive career option in terms of self-employment.