Entrepreneurship, culture, and the epigenetic revolution: a research note

Zoltan Acs,Emma Lappi

doi:10.1007/s11187-019-00230-0

Abstract

We show how the type of alcohol consumed is related to the type of entrepreneurship present for economies in Europe. We differentiate between beer-, wine-, and spirit-drinking countries and distinguish between productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurship. The underlying links do not emerge from drinking per se but rather the drinking habits and taste for beverage types capture deep cultural features and cultural similarities amongst the countries. Societies that prefer to drink beer are closer to each other culturally than those which prefer drinking wine or spirits. Therefore, the taste for alcohol type is merely an instrument in explaining cultural and institutional differences across entrepreneurship. Broadly speaking, beer-drinking countries are characterized by higher shares of productive entrepreneurship, wine-drinking countries with unproductive entrepreneurship, and spirit-drinking countries with destructive entrepreneurship. We discuss mechanisms in which the results are found and highlight a new research agenda, emphasizing the potential role of epigenetics.

Highlights

Baumol (1990) contributed to the body of entrepreneurship literature by differentiating between three entrepreneurship types; productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurship
Culture, and genetics are all linked through epigenetics, a scientific field which has gained increasing attention by biologists, medicine, and the likes in the recent decade, and suggest that we need more evidence on how the environment changes how the genes are expressed which has implications for entrepreneurship and growth (Carey 2012).1 et al (2013), who propose a theoretical model on destructive entrepreneurship
We firstly present evidence dividing the countries based on first preferences alone for the three entrepreneurship measures using box-plots to show the distribution of the entrepreneurship variables respectively

Summary

Introduction

Baumol (1990) contributed to the body of entrepreneurship literature by differentiating between three entrepreneurship types; productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurship. The productive entrepreneurship includes activities that are wealth creating, unproductive covers activities that merely re-distribute existing rents, and destructive one destroys economic rents and wealth. Baumol (1990) theorizes that entrepreneurship is present, in one form or another, at all times, and it always plays a role in an economy He defines productive entrepreneurship as a set of entrepreneurial activities that create economic value such as innovative actions. Unproductive entrepreneurship includes activities which merely redistribute already existing rents, such as tax evasion and other redistributive activities, and destructive entrepreneurship as “discovery of a previously unused legal gambit that is effective in diverting rents to those who are first in exploiting it.” Many have concentrated on the differentiation between productive and unproductive entrepreneurship and neglect the destructive one, with exceptions such as, e.g., Desai

Results

Discussion

Conclusion