| dc.description.abstract | Scholars have articulated a number of arguments regarding the beneficial effects of opportunity-motivated (as opposed to necessity-driven) entrepreneurs, and this study delves somewhat deeper into this topic. First, this study uses the expectation of job creation over five years as a metric to measure the benefits of entrepreneurship and employs this metric as a dependent variable defined as growth expectation. Second, this study utilizes a sample of 111,194 entrepreneurs to estimate how growth expectation is affected by the interaction between opportunity motivation and five entrepreneurial competencies: opportunity-alertness, self-efficacy, networking, risk-willingness, and education. Third, because the most significant interaction effect resulted from the interaction between opportunity-motivation and education, this combination is further explored with respect to the additional effect of three firm characteristics: operational phase, export orientation and innovation orientation. In the context of a relatively homogenous group of 19 Latin American countries, the results suggest that opportunity-motivated entrepreneurs’ numbers of years of schooling and an export-oriented firm provides added value and jointly boosts growth expectations, as reflected in expected increases in the number of employees | |
