The Strength and Persistence of Entrepreneurial Cultures

The twentieth century United States provides a natural experiment to measure the strength and persistence of entrepreneurial cultures. Assuming immigrants bear the cultures of their birth place, comparison of revealed entrepreneurial propensities of US immigrant groups in 1910 and 2000 reflected these backgrounds. Two measures of entrepreneurial culture are employed; the first is simply the chance that a member of the migrant group will be an employer and the second is the origin country effect on this probability, conditional upon personal characteristics. The preferred second measure shows persistence of some cultures and change of others over the twentieth century. Among the more stable cultures North-western Europe, where modern economic growth is widely held to have originated, did not host unusually strong entrepreneurial propensities. Instead such cultures were carried by persons originating from Greece, Turkey and Italy, together with Jews.