Opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship and education

This article examines the differential impact of educational attainment on opportunity versus necessity entrepreneurship using cross-national data from the World Value Survey matched with Global Entrepreneurship Monitor entrepreneurship data. Employing hierarchical data across individuals, countries, and time, we document a non-linear, inverted U-shaped relationship between educational attainment and entrepreneurship. While education initially promotes entrepreneurial activity, higher levels of education significantly reduce entrepreneurship, with the deterrent effect being around seven times stronger for necessity entrepreneurship than for opportunity entrepreneurship at the tertiary level. These findings reconcile ambiguous results in previous literature by demonstrating that aggregated entrepreneurship measures mask opposing effects across entrepreneurship types.