Risk Taking by Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs bear substantial risk, but empirical evidence shows no sign of a positive premium. This paper develops a theory of endogenous entrepreneurial risk taking that explains why self-financed entrepreneurs may find it optimal to invest in risky projects offering no risk premium. Consistently with empiri cal evidence, the model predicts that poorer entrepreneurs are more likely to undertake risky projects. It also finds that incentives for risk taking are stronger when agents are impatient. (JEL G31, G32, L25, L26) Entrepreneurial activity is risky and poorly diversified. Most economic models would suggest that the high degree of entrepreneurial risk should be compensated by a significant premium in returns.1 Yet empirical evidence finds that the premium to entrepreneurial activity is surprisingly low,2 which raises the question of why people become entrepreneurs. A number of hypotheses have been offered to answer this question, mostly based on the idea that entrepreneurs have a different set of preferences or beliefs (e.g., risk tolerance or overoptimism). This paper provides an alternative theory of endogenous entrepreneurial risk taking that does not rely on individual heterogeneity of preferences or beliefs. We incorporate endogenous choice of entrepreneurial risk in a simple dynamic occupational choice model. A borrowing constrained agent chooses whether to be a worker or an entrepreneur. The occupational choice is discrete, in the sense that each activity requires full-time involvement. A worker receives fixed wage income, while an entrepreneur gets access to an entrepreneurial technology and decides how much to invest in it. Borrowing constraints induce endogenous sepa ration into different occupations: the rich, who have sufficient funds for investment, choose to be entrepreneurs, and the poor prefer to receive fixed pay by becoming workers. The indivisibility of occupational choice may create a nonconcavity in the agent's value function as a function of