Hessel Oosterbeek

Hessel Oosterbeek

Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Amsterdam · Researcher, VU Amsterdam

The impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepeneurship skills and motivation

Hessel Oosterbeek and Mirjam van Praag and Auke IJsselstein

European Economic Review 54, 442-454 (2010)

This paper analyzes the impact of a leading entrepreneurship education program on college students’ entrepreneurship competencies and intentions using an instrumental variables approach in a difference-in-differences framework. We exploit that the program was offered to students at one location of a school but not at another location of the same school. Location choice (and thereby treatment) is instrumented by the relative distance of locations to parents’ place of residence. The results show that the program does not have the intended effects: the effect on students’ self-assessed entrepreneurial skills is insignificant and the effect on the intention to become an entrepreneur is even significantly negative.

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