Essays in labour economics and entrepreneurship

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with research questions in the fields of labour economics and entrepreneurship. Chapter 1 introduces the four different research areas of this thesis and provides an overview of the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 contributes to the understanding of the participation in on-the-job training from a behavioural perspective. This is done by incorporating individual's subjective beliefs about the return to training. These beliefs depend on their locus of control, a psychological concept about beliefs regarding an individual's control over the outcome of events in their life. Our empirical results suggest that having an internal locus of control is associated with higher participation in general but not in specific training. Specifically, general training is associated with greater expectations of future wage growth for those with an internal locus of control. There is no evidence of any link between locus of control and wage expectations or post-training wages in case of specific training. Chapter 3 evaluates the relationship between intergenerational co-residence and female labour force participation in Kyrgyzstan. The direction of the effect is not clear \textit{ex-ante}. While elderly caretaking responsibilities might lead to lower labour force participation, child care support offered by grandparents might lead to the opposite effect. We find that co-residence has no effect on female labour force participation and the number of working hours. While other studies find positive impacts of co-residence on female labour force participation, we seek to analyze the channels that might link co-residence and female labour force participation. We find that intergenerational co-residence leads to around half an hour more spent per day on elder care, on average. We find that this is at the expense of the women's leisure time. Chapter 4 analyses constraints to investments of micro and small enterprises. I find that in the overall estimation sample, savings and managerial constraints are associated with lower investments. Further, the paper identifies several subgroups that are subject to certain constraints. These results reflect that savings and managerial constraints are non-negligible factors for firm investments. The subsample analysis provides an attempt to identify firms with similar constraints prior to treatment assignment, which is important to correctly match client characteristics with the type of training that will be useful for them. Chapter 5 evaluates two different financial education trainings. The first teaches simple rules of financial decision making (rule-of-thumb training) and the second training includes, in addition to the rule-of-thumb training, an add-on where entrepreneurs receive individual information (personalized training) about the financial situation of their business. Our estimates show that both trainings are generally effective. Evaluating the effect on each outcome family shows that the effect of personalized training on savings is strongest, which is 0.279 SD units and highly statistically significant.