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Prof. Maddalena Ronchi
Assistant Professor of Finance
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

Using registry data from Denmark, this paper shows that higher exposure to entrepreneurship during adolescence affects the representation of women and the allocation of talent in this profession. We track the educational and professional choices of one million individuals from adolescence to adulthood and exploit within-school cross-cohort variation in exposure to entrepreneurship, as measured by the share of an adolescent’s peers whose parents are entrepreneurs during the last years of compulsory schooling. We find that early exposure to entrepreneurs encourages girls’ entry and tenure into this profession, while it does not affect the professional choices of boys. The effect is entirely driven by exposure to the entrepreneur parents of female peers and works via a decrease in girls’ likelihood to discontinue education at the end of compulsory school and to hold low-paying jobs as adults. Moreover, the increase in female entrepreneurship is associated with the creation of firms that are better performing and more female-friendly than the average entrepreneurial firm. Taken together, these findings suggest that gender-specific entry barriers, which appear to be both cultural and informational in nature, may prevent some talented female entrepreneurs from pursuing their comparative advantage.