'Entrepreneurship, Down-Side Risks, and Social Insurance'

In 2009 I argued:

...A more extensive social safety net can reduce the risk of attempts at entrepreneurship. If there is an extensive social safety net to fall back upon if things don't work out, you might be more willing to quit the job you hate (the one with health insurance for the kids) and sink everything you have into a small business that you've always wanted to run. But I'm not sure the data above support this interpretation, i.e. that there is an obvious positive association between the strength of social insurance and the prevalence of small business. But it is highly suggestive, and regressions that control for other cross-country differences could help to settle the issue.

Nick Bunker discusses a paper that provides supporting evidence:

Entrepreneurship, down-side risks, and social insurance, Washington Center for Equitable Growth: When Americans talk about entrepreneurs, or at least the reasons for becoming one, the possibility of great success is most often the first topic of discussion. The great wealth that company founders such as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg amassed certainly make the idea of starting a business more attractive to potential entrepreneurs. But according to a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, we should be paying more attend to the down-side risks when it comes to fostering entrepreneurship.

The new paper, by economists John Hombert and David Thesmar of HEC Paris, David Sraer of the University of California-Berkeley, and Antoinette Schoar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looks at a reform in the French unemployment insurance system enacted in 2002. The reform allowed unemployed workers who start a new business to keep the right to their unemployment benefits for up to three years. They could use the accrued benefits to make up the difference between their business’s revenue and the level of benefits they would have otherwise received.

The four researchers find that the policy change acted as a sort of entrepreneurship insurance. Workers who before would have been hesitant to start a business may be more likely to do so now that they had some protection against downside risk. The new paper documents that the rate at which firms were created increased by 25 percent after the 2002 reform....

They also find that ... the evidence points toward these new entrepreneurs being capable businesspeople who just needed a safety net before starting a business. What’s more, these new firms had a positive impact on the overall economy. ...

Many U.S. policymakers and economists are worried about the decline in entrepreneurship and business creation. They might want to consider investigating whether alleviating the down-side risks to starting a company can help solve that problem.