Fact 1.
The relationship between entrepreneurship and education is U-shaped, i.e. people with low or high levels of education are more likely to be entrepreneurs than people with intermediate levels of education.
Whereas there is an abundant literature on the impact of an additional year of schooling on wages or salaries of employees, the relationship between entrepreneurship and schooling has received much less attention, and much less sophisticated econometric treatment. Therefore, in this section, I simply focus on results in the literature on the proportion of entrepreneurs by educational attainment. In Section 5, I supplement this with further, new evidence from the NLSY79. In that section, I also go beyond the focus on schooling in much of the entrepreneurship literature and consider another, potentially more informative proxy for ability: wages in previous employment. Results from the NLSY79 are generally in line with the ones from other countries and data sources reported in this section.