Viktor Venhorst (p), Sierdjan Koster

In attempts to stimulate entrepreneurship in a general sense and university-business relations specifically, entrepreneurship is given more and more emphasis in curricula of Institutes of Higher Education (HEIs). Students are taught and stimulated to start their own businesses early in their careers. Unfortunately however, little is known about the impact of student self-employment on the development of their careers later on, either in self-employment or in wage employment. This study assesses, using longitudinal Dutch register data on recent HEI graduates, to what extent self-employment experience as a student influences the propensity of being self-employed after graduation, earnings from self-employment after graduation and finally, wages from dependent employment after graduation.

We find that, on average, self-employed students outperform their peers without self-employment experience: In the first years after graduation, they earn higher wages and, if running a firm, have higher income from self-employment.

After controlling for selection into student self-employment, the enabling effects of partners and differences in industries, we find positive effects on continued self-employment for men and women, as well as on the likelihood of being in dependent employment for men. However, we find no effect of self-employment experience as a student on subsequent income from self-employment. Also, we find evidence for slight negative effects on wages further into the careers of men and women.

This leads us to conclude that, even though student self-employment signals persons with great potential on the labour market, it does not foster more successful outcomes. We find no convincing evidence of a learning effect that can be capitalized upon in the early labour market careers of graduates.

Annie Tubadji (p), Peter Nijkamp, Enrico Santarelli, Robert Huggins

The Cambridge region (UK) is often regarded as a highly successful science and technology pole, characterized by an entrepreneurial boom known as the "Cambridge Phenomenon". The present paper addresses the question of whether this success story is exclusively (or mainly) caused by an innovation bubble. Our analysis is predominantly inspired by George Shackle’s (1949) definition of uncertainty as a function that truncates (ignores) investment opportunities for which so little knowledge on their successful implementation exists that they might lead to surprising business results. The key hypothesis underlying this paper is that the acceptance or management of this type of uncertainty may partly explain the “Cambridge Phenomenon”. To offer a solid empirical examination, we employ the unique Cambridge Ahead dataset on the performance of all 20,000 companies established in the region during the period 1919 – 2014, tracked over five years. The results from a Cox Proportional Hazard Model clearly demonstrate the existence of a decision-driven paradox consistent with Shackle’s so-called ‘potential surprise function’. Namely, within five years of starting-up, the most daring companies appear to die faster. However, daring companies that have survived over this period appear to live longer than other survivors. Moreover, it is found that a critical determinant of the survival of the daring-type of companies is formed by the local entrepreneurial context. Finally, the agglomeration effect on the speed of company death is found to account for about 3% per Cambridge Area ward (lowest administrative division). One third of it is explained by very small variations in the local cultural milieu, especially with regard to attitudes to uncertainty.