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Entrepreneurship and immigration: evidence from GEM Luxembourg

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Abstract

This study analyses the role of immigration background and education in creating new business initiatives in Luxembourg, a country where 44 % of the resident population is immigrant. We investigate the features of entrepreneurs and of the Luxembourgish System of Entrepreneurship using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitoring surveys of 2013 and 2014. We study the effect of immigration through all the stages of entrepreneurial process: interest in starting a new business, effectively starting, running a new business and managing an established business. We adopt a sequential logit to model entrepreneurial process as a sequence of stages. We find that first-generation immigrants, and in particular highly educated ones, are more interested in starting a new business than non-immigrants, but they do not differ in subsequent entrepreneurial phases. We argue that policies to attract highly educated immigrants can promote entrepreneurial initiatives in Luxembourg.

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Notes

  1. Ethnic enclaves can be defined as self-contained minority communities nested in metropolitan areas (Wilson and Martin 1982).

  2. In a well-known study, Wilson and Portes (1980) found that Cuban immigrants working for Cuban employers in Miami experienced significant returns to their human capital.

  3. Luxembourg en chiffres, STATEC, 2014 can be found on: http://www.statistiques.public.lu/en/publications/series/lux-figures/index.html.

  4. On labour force statistics in Luxembourg, one can see data and publications on STATEC’s website, in particular http://www.statistiques.public.lu/en/population-employment/index.html. One can also see the various issues of the Rapport travail et cohésion sociale, published regularly by STATEC.

  5. In six other European countries—namely, Cyprus, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland and Belgium—people with an immigration background will account for more than 30 % of the resident population.

  6. For example, questionnaire provides information about the sector of economic activity only after the starting of the new venture. Therefore, only the last two phases include these controls.

  7. Model estimates are available upon request from the authors.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the participants to the “Conference of National Systems of Entrepreneurship” held in Mannheim on 20–21 November 2014 and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques du Grand-Duché du Luxembourg (STATEC), 13 rue Erasme, 2013, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

    Chiara Peroni, Cesare A. F. Riillo & Francesco Sarracino

  2. Agence pour la normalisation et l’économie de la connaissance (ANEC), 19-21, boulevard Royal, 2449, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

    Chiara Peroni, Cesare A. F. Riillo & Francesco Sarracino

  3. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation

    Francesco Sarracino

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  1. Chiara Peroni
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  2. Cesare A. F. Riillo
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Correspondence to Cesare A. F. Riillo.

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The opinions and views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect in any way those of STATEC.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 4 Descriptive statistics
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Table 5 Matrix of pairwise correlations
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Table 6 Marginal effects after sequential logit for the probability of being a potential entrepreneur
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Table 7 Marginal effects after sequential logit for the probability of being a nascent entrepreneur
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Table 8 Marginal effects after sequential logit for the probability of being a new entrepreneur
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Table 9 Marginal effects after sequential logit for the probability of being an established entrepreneur
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Peroni, C., Riillo, C.A.F. & Sarracino, F. Entrepreneurship and immigration: evidence from GEM Luxembourg. Small Bus Econ 46, 639–656 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-016-9708-y

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