The tendency to identify new business opportunities is in their genes. Income from self-employment is heritable, which means that genetics affect not only the tendency to participate in entrepreneurship but also the ability to do it. There are genetic factors that make some people more likely to be entrepreneurs than others. Genetic variants that are linked to entrepreneurship make people who have them more likely to take risks and be self-employed.
These genes are linked to the receptors for the neurotransmitters of dopamine and serotonin. However, the environment plays an important role in professional and life choices. Despite several attempts in the last decade, until now, no strong association has been discovered between genetic variants and entrepreneurship. Our overview and analysis of these papers give a clear answer to our first research question: “Why has the identification of strong associations between genetic variants and entrepreneurship not been successful in the last decade? Regardless of whether a hypothesis-based or hypothesis-free approach was used, until now genetic discovery studies on entrepreneurship have not been sufficiently powerful.
However, based on the results of large-scale genetic discovery studies on other behavioral traits (such as educational attainment), we can expect strong associations between genetic variants and entrepreneurship to be identified if a sufficiently large sample can be gathered. Datasets containing both genetic data and entrepreneurship information are relatively scarce (Van der Loos et al. Therefore, a sufficiently powerful GWAS in terms of entrepreneurship will soon be feasible. He took over the family business with his two brothers in 1968, telling his seven children not to set their sights on joining the then second-generation furniture company.
Based on their main GWAS on risk tolerance, 99 SNPs were selected for further analysis regarding their association with entrepreneurship. This need for a higher level of enthusiasm can lead people to participate in entrepreneurship as a sensation-seeking activity, similar to other risky behaviors. For example, previous research shows that body height is associated with entrepreneurship (Rietveld et al. Understanding entrepreneurship depends on explanations of how genetics and the environment complement each other.
First, the results of the analyses show how polygenic risk scores constructed for a variety of traits (and not just entrepreneurship) can help identify regions of the human genome that are particularly important for business behavior. Studies analyzing the heritability of entrepreneurship indicate that explanations for why people participate in gene-ignoring ventures are incomplete. Therefore, such an SNP is unlikely to provide much information about the mechanisms underlying business behavior. Due to data constraints, the last and largest GWAS on entrepreneurship used self-employment as an indicator of entrepreneurship (Van der Loos et al.
The public policy implications for how to encourage entrepreneurship and even if redistributing more through taxation would be enormous. He is a member of the Chair of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which is part of Labex Entrepreneurship (University of Montpellier, France) and is funded by the French government (Labex Entreprendre, ANR-10-Labex-11-0.
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