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In spite of the recognised significance of habitual entrepreneurship, enough is not known about the drivers that lead individuals to become habitual entrepreneurs. Drawing from Lazear’s theory of entrepreneurship, this paper addresses the specifics of habitual entrepreneurs in terms of different human capital-related factors, including breadth and diversity of experience and education. This paper aims to elucidate what makes some people habitual entrepreneurs.

In this empirical study on a broad data set (1,538 surveys), the authors juxtapose habitual entrepreneurs with ex-entrepreneurs who decided to give up and chose a salary job after running their first and only firm. The authors formulate four hypotheses that are tested by using a logit regression to model the probability of being a habitual entrepreneur vs giving up entrepreneurship and choosing a salary job.

The probability of being a habitual entrepreneur increases with the diversity of both managerial and professional experience, as well as with the breadth of education. In addition, entrepreneurial self-efficacy supports setting up more than one firm.

The findings actualise knowledge of whether habitual entrepreneurs are unique concerning their pools of human capital. They broaden the knowledge of the backgrounds of the decision to start up a business again.

This paper contributes to the current entrepreneurship discussion by offering an enhanced understanding of habitual entrepreneurship. The phenomenon of repeatedly engaging in entrepreneurship is a promising source of knowledge that enables us to better understand entrepreneurship. In addition, the authors verify and extend Lazear’s theory to a new group of entrepreneurs.

The purpose of the paper is to assess the fiscal sustainability of nine southern African countries that belong to the Southern African Development Community.

In this paper, the author performs a novel time-varying analysis of fiscal sustainability in southern African countries.

The authors found that in Zimbabwe and Namibia, the formal condition of solvency was not fulfilled, resulting in the explosive growth of debt during the recent slowdown. In contrast, Angola, Botswana and Malawi prove to run sustainable fiscal policies, and they were also fiscally invulnerable to the recent unfavourable economic developments in Africa. For the rest of the countries in the sample (Eswatini, Lesotho, South Africa and Zambia), the results are mixed.

In the existing literature, there is abundance of empirical evidence concerning fiscal sustainability in European and American countries. In contrast, there is strikingly little knowledge concerning this phenomenon in African countries. The authors tried to fill this gap using a novel, time-varying approach.

The purpose of this paper is to identify human capital factors that pertain both to setting up and successfully running a business. To achieve this objective, the authors apply and extend the theory of career choice offered by Lazear (2005) that explains individual selection into entrepreneurship.

The authors hypothesise that individuals with broader educational and professional backgrounds are more likely to start a business and are more likely to run a business in the long term. The authors tested the hypotheses using unique data from 800 current entrepreneurs, 800 employees who were previously entrepreneurs and 842 employees with no entrepreneurial experience, by means of a logit regression with robust standard errors and extensive robustness checks.

The authors empirically show that individuals with more diverse educational and professional backgrounds tend to have both greater chances of starting a company, as well as a higher probability of entrepreneurial success. Surprisingly, having managerial experience proved to exert a negative influence on the likelihood of starting a business while having an insignificant impact on the odds of entrepreneurial success.

The findings are informative for those planning or pursuing an entrepreneurial career, but they are also relevant for the purpose of entrepreneurship education.

The author's extend the body of research supporting Lazear's (2005) theory by showing that broad education and professional experience not only contribute to a higher propensity to start a company but they are also success factors in business per se.