Several limitations to this thesis have been already discussed in each of the correspond- ing chapters. Here, I will consider a number of gaps that have remained unanswered in my work and some limitations that affect the comparison of the findings across the chapters.
and at the end of the period they decide whether they switch to entrepreneurship or rather remain as employees in the firm. Nevertheless, when the focus has been on the skills and learning that can be acquired during the employment career a concern arises regarding past employment relationships. For instance, in Chapter 4 for the sake of simplicity and empirical feasibility I have only considered the characteristics of the last employer while in reality each individual in the dataset holds around 12 differ- ent labour relationships with a variety of employers. This work has been, therefore, unable to explain if previous job experiences in small firms have any influence in the transition into entrepreneurship, and more broadly, I believe that this may represent one of the main challenges of the current state of learning theories. Even empirically, one should ideally take into account if earlier work experiences in small firms also play a positive role in the transitions into entrepreneurship, for example, by including a variable accounting for the accumulated tenure in small firms during each individual’s career history.
Furthermore, I should note that the present work implicitly assumes that the size of established firms remains on average stable over time. Otherwise, if the proportion of firms that were growing fast was high we would observe many employees working for large firms, while they were initially working in a small firm. Therefore, any interpretation about the firm size effect would be misleading.
Another theoretical gap concerns the reconciliation of some of the results in Chapter 3 and 4. One of the main findings that emerges from Chapter 4 is that the self- employed coming from small firms tend to do so after being dismissed. Moreover, both in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 I find support for the view that small firms shape the abilities and attitudes of their employees which make them more likely to start- up a new firm afterwards. So taken together, if workers from small firms are better equipped to found businesses, one of the questions that remains to be answered is why they appear to wait to be dismissed to become entrepreneurs. The theoretical model presented in Chapter 3 offers the basis for a plausible explanation. Assuming that the rationale for individuals to move into entrepreneurship is based on the comparison between the expected returns they can obtain as entrepreneurs (both monetary and
non-pecuniary) and the wage they can earn in paid work, dismissals can switch the final choice by altering the value of the latter. That is, as long as individuals keep their job their wage is understood to be higher than the expected returns they would perceive as self-employed, but if they are dismissed their wage in a new job might drop below the self-employment threshold. Hence, my finding on a larger positive effect of dismissals on the likelihood to move into self-employment for those being dismissed from small firms suggests that their post-layoff expected wage is lower than their initial wage. When this is combined with a greater decline in earnings for those in paid work then for workers leaving small firms during adverse economic conditions, we would observe, as revealed by the results in Chapter 4, a larger positive impact of dismissals on self-employment entry.
Finally, there is a note of caution when comparing the results from different chapters. While Chapters 2 and 3 explore the transitions to entrepreneurship us- ing Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data, hence relying on the definition used in the GEM framework and defining entrepreneurs as those individuals involved in the setting up of a business they own and manage, Chapter 4 examines entries into self-employment. In this last chapter I no longer use GEM data but the employ- ment history of a large sample of Spanish workers included in the “Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales” (MCVL ) or the Longitudinal Sample of Working Lives MCVL provided by the Spanish Social Security. Self-employed according to the definition of the Spanish Social Security regulation encompasses individuals working for themselves irrespective of whether they hire employees and including managers who own the direct or indirect control of a business. Therefore, it includes individuals working on their own account but who do not actually found a new business, such as skilled craftsmen
self-employed or even restrict the definition of the self-employed to those with em- ployees, for example. However, the MCVL does not provide the required information to do so. Furthermore, I am also unable to measure the extent to which dependent self-employed are present in the sample, that is, self-employed that worked for a given firm as regular employees and became self-employed as part of the firm’s strategy to increase flexibility and lower costs. Although it seems to be quite an extensive prac- tice (Roman et al.,2011) and we could expect it to have increased during the adverse economic climate, the dataset does not contain any information about the firms that the self-employed are working for.