The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: A longitudinal study of lottery wins

Flèche, Sarah; LEPINTEUR, Anthony; Powdthavee, Nattavudh

doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2021.05.038

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The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: A longitudinal study of lottery wins

Flèche, Sarah; LEPINTEUR, Anthony; Powdthavee, Nattavudh

2021 • In Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 188, p. 591 - 607

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

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https://hdl.handle.net/10993/66740

DOI
10.1016/j.jebo.2021.05.038

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Keywords :

BHPS; Gender inequality; Lottery wins; Self-employment; Economics and Econometrics; Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Abstract :

[en] Would improving women's access to capital reduce the gender entrepreneurial gap? We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing between large to small winners, we find that an increase in lottery win in period t − 1 significantly increases the likelihood of becoming self-employed in period t. This windfall effect is statistically the same in magnitude for men and women; the top 25% winners (an average win = £831.16) in year t − 1 report a significant increase in the probability of self-employment in year t by approximately 2 percentage points, which is approximately 20–30% of the gender entrepreneurial gap. These results suggest that we can causally reduce the gender entrepreneurial gap by improving women's access to capital that might not be as readily available to the aspiring female entrepreneurs as it is to male entrepreneurs.

Disciplines :

Special economic topics (health, labor, transportation...)

Author, co-author :

Flèche, Sarah; CNRS - Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, University Paris 1, France ; Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, United Kingdom

LEPINTEUR, Anthony ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences (FHSE) > Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences (DBCS) > Health and Behaviour

Powdthavee, Nattavudh ; Warwick Business School and IZA, United Kingdom

External co-authors :

yes

Language :

English

Title :

The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: A longitudinal study of lottery wins

Publication date :

August 2021

Journal title :

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

ISSN :

0167-2681

eISSN :

1879-1751

Publisher :

Elsevier B.V.

Volume :

188

Pages :

591 - 607

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

https://api.elsevier.com/content/article/PII:S0167268121002304?httpAccept=text/xml

Funders :

Agence Nationale de la Recherche

Funding text :

This work was supported by the French National Research Agency Grant (ANR-17-EURE-0020).

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since 11 December 2025

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