Entrepreneurship Training Makes Happy: Examining Short- and Long-Term Effects on Life Satisfaction

Abstract

Based on theories of life satisfaction, we develop a theoretical model to explain how an entrepreneurship training affects life satisfaction. The model states that an entrepreneurship training has positive short- and long-term effects on life satisfaction; however, the underlying mechanisms for the effects are fundamentally different. Specifically, we hypothesize that the entrepreneurship training has an immediate short-term boost on life satisfaction which wears off in the long-run. We further hypothesize that the training has a delayed long-term effect through self-employment which holds in the long-run. We conducted an entrepreneurship training as part of a randomized controlled field experiment with five measurement waves over a total period of 2.5 years to test our hypotheses. The total sample size was 1,069 observations from 304 students. Using discontinuous growth modeling to take into account the temporality of our hypothesized effects, we found empirical support for our theoretical model. The findings suggest that there are different pathways through which an entrepreneurship training increases life satisfaction in the short- and long-run.