Entrepreneurship and subjective well-being: Does the motivation to start-up a firm matter?

Although there have been many studies on the subjective well-being of entrepreneurs, these have compared entrepreneurs’ well-being with those of non-entrepreneurs, or with economic and firm performance, or attempted to identify the determinants their subjective well-being. So far there have been only limited attempts to compare the subjective well-being of differently motivated entrepreneurs. This paper is an attempt to contribute filling this gap. We explore the relationship between the motivation for entering into entrepreneurship and subjective well-being. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor in 70 countries covering 159,274 individuals. Using a two-stage probit least squares estimator to test the relationship between motivation and subjective well-being, with particular concern for the direction of causality, we find that necessity-motivated entrepreneurs report well-being levels similar to opportunity-motivated entrepreneurs. We also find that in countries where necessity entrepreneurship is more prevalent (typically developing countries), lower rates of entrepreneurial entry will be associated with higher reported subjective well-being of the necessity-motivated entrepreneurs. The upshot of our findings is that entrepreneurship, even if motivated by necessity, contributes to subjective well-being.