Microdata Access Grant 2022. Authors: Mery Ferrando, Teodora Tsankova (Tilburg University, Tilburg School of Economics and Management); Ashley Wong (Northwestern University); Francesca Truffa (Standford University).
Women continue to be underrepresented in entrepreneurship and female-owned businesses tend to be smaller, less likely to receive external financing, and are less profitable than male-owned ones. In this project, we plan to leverage the richness of the CBS Microdata and two maternity leave reforms to shed light on the gender gap in entrepreneurship and its determinants. First, we will document new descriptive facts on the gender gap in entrepreneurship, its evolution along the life cycle trajectories of male and female entrepreneurs, and the effect of motherhood on entries and exit from self-employment and firm-level outcomes, such as profits and innovation. Second, we will provide causal evidence on how maternity leave policies can affect the gender gap in entrepreneurship by exploiting two maternity leave reforms in 2004 and 2008 that respectively removed and reinstated public maternity leave insurance for self-employed mothers.