Lifting the Iron Curtain: The Effect of Schooling on ...

Lifting the Iron Curtain:

The Effect of Schooling on Entrepreneurial Intentions

Oliver Falck+, Robert Gold*, Stephan Heblich

Preliminary Draft July 2013

ABSTRACT This paper exploits Germany's recent history of separation and reunification to identify the effects of an unexpected change in the school system on individual entrepreneurial intentions. East German students experienced a sudden change from socialist schooling to entrepreneurial schooling under the free market system. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we compare East German students with 0-10 years of entrepreneurial schooling to a West German control group. We estimate that one additional year of entrepreneurial schooling increases students' entrepreneurial intentions by about 4.9 percent. Controlling for parents' values and norms supports our argument that we measure an effect of schooling on entrepreneurial intentions that is not confounded by the social environment. Robustness tests include matching and student fixed effects confirm the validity of our results.

+ University of Munich, Ifo Institute ? Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, and CESifo, Poschingerstr. 5, D-81679 Munich, Germany. Phone: +49 89 9224 1370, Email: falck@ifo.de. * Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Hindenburgufer 66, D-24105 Kiel, Germany. Phone: +49 431 8814 412, Email: robert.gold@ifw-kiel.de. University of Stirling, CESifo, IZA and SERC, Department of Economic, Stirling, FK 4LA, UK. Phone: +44 1786 467481, Email: stephan.heblich@stir.ac.uk.

1. Introduction

What makes an entrepreneur? This simple question is equally important for politicians who are looking for ways to sustain economic growth as for researchers who are trying to understand the determinants driving entrepreneurship. On the political agenda, entrepreneurship gained increasing importance over the last two decades. The most recent initiative by the European Union, the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan, aims at unleashing Europe's entrepreneurial potential and advancing a culture of entrepreneurship. One of the initiative's main goals is to invest in entrepreneurship education as "one of the highest return investments Europe can make" (EU, 2013, p. 5).1 From the academic side, we know little about the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education. Only a few papers exploit experimental variation to evaluate entrepreneurship courses in the Netherlands (Oosterbeck et al. 2010; Rosendahl Huber et al., 2012), training measures for individuals at working age in the US (Fairlie 2012), or training sessions for micro-entrepreneurs in Peru (Karlan and Valdivia, 2010). All studies find at best limited effects on individual entrepreneurial intentions or success. These initial findings clearly question the effectiveness of public investments in entrepreneurship education.

In this paper, we take a broader perspective on entrepreneurship education. Instead of looking at the effect of specific entrepreneurship courses that teach entrepreneurial skills, we focus on schooling in general.2 Specifically, we look at the virtues transmitted in the schooling system that may affect individual entrepreneurial intentions in the future. In a very basic sense, this may involve the perception of entrepreneurship as an occupational choice; but we may also think of stimulating non-cognitive skills such as individual initiative or creativity and discrete thinking as basis for problem solving skills and innovativeness.3 Knowing about this potential leverage is especially important from a public policy perspective since it provides a viable way to increase individual entrepreneurial intentions and the perception of entrepreneurship as occupational choice. An increasing attractiveness of entrepreneurship as occupational choice may subsequently raise the effectiveness of entrepreneurship courses.

1 The other goals are to change the public perception of entrepreneurs, to provide better access to entrepreneurial finance, and to supporting underrepresented groups. Kerr and Nanda (2011) provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on entrepreneurial finance and Fairlie and Robb (2007) and Sanders and Nee (1996) are nice examples of research on immigrant entrepreneurship. 2 To our knowledge, Sobel and King (2008) and Falck and Woessmann (2012) are the only papers that consider the effect of the school system on entrepreneurship. They find a positive effect of competition from private schools on students' entrepreneurial intentions. One explanation for this finding may be that competition leads to more innovative curricula. 3 Heckman and Rubinstein (2001) make a case for the importance of non-cognitive skills in determining labor market outcomes in general.

To test the hypothesis that the school system affects individual entrepreneurial intentions, we have to overcome the empirical challenge that schooling and other aspects of socialization simultaneously affect individual entrepreneurial intentions. To disentangle the effect of schooling, we exploit the 1990 reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as quasi-natural experiment. We compare cohorts of German university students in reunified Germany (GER) who grew up in the East (former GDR) to those who were educated in the West (former FRG). With the reunification, the GDR school system that taught socialist values and discouraged entrepreneurial thinking changed overnight. In this process, one third of the East German teachers were "early retired" and all East German states implemented new school systems that were oriented towards the West German curricula. For example, the federal state Thuringia widely adopted the Bavarian school system where economic education is mandatory in secondary education. While the school environment changed suddenly with the fall of the Berlin wall, the social environment and the parental environment did not change overnight (cf. Alesina and Fuchs-Schuendeln, 2007; Bauernschuster et al. 2012). Even a decade after the reunification, we still find strong indications of socialist norms and values among East Germans. This setup provides us with a change in the school system towards a more entrepreneurship-friendly education, while holding socialization to a great extent constant.

Our analysis exploits a large survey regularly conducted among university students in Germany that includes over 32,000 observations from 4 survey waves conducted between the years 1992 and 2001. This selection ensures that the East German students observed in the survey underwent (at least some years of) schooling in the socialist GDR. The survey covers questions about the study progress, work and learning habits, leisure time activities, attitudes, and job preferences including entrepreneurship as occupational choice. Additional questions provide information about students' family background and schooling. Information about demographic variables, such as age or gender, is also available. Altogether, this survey draws a comprehensive picture of the conditions and perspectives of students at German universities. By restricting our analysis to university students, we explicitly turn our focus to a group of individuals who are particularly qualified to start technology-oriented firms and thus meet the EU's idea of entrepreneurship as "powerful driver of economic growth and job creation" (EU, 2013, p.3).

We evaluate the effect of a change in the schooling system in a difference-in-differences framework where we compare cohorts of students around the time of the German reunification in East and West Germany. The difference-in-differences estimator measures the

effect of one additional year of schooling in reunified Germany on the entrepreneurial intentions of East German students. West German students are the control group. Under the assumption that the social environment in East Germany did not change overnight, this allows us to evaluate the positive effect of changing to an entrepreneurial school curriculum conditional on a large number of individual controls. We find that every additional year under an entrepreneurial school system increases East German students' entrepreneurial intentions by abound 4.9 percent.

We provide a number of robustness tests to support the validity of our results. To assess the assumption of a persistent social environment in East Germany, we include controls for changes in parents' values and find no confounding influences. We use a propensity score matching to reduce East and West German students' observable differences that may bias our estimates. Again, we do not find any indication of confounding effects. Finally, we model the occupational choice to be an entrepreneur or a dependent employee in (in a private company) using two separate questions that evaluate the attractiveness of each choice. Since we observe two observations per student we can include individual fixed effects that absorb any unobserved individual characteristics that are not covered by our rich set of individual controls. All robustness tests point to the same direction as our baseline results: The change to a more entrepreneurial school curriculum increases individual entrepreneurial intentions significantly.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes differences in schooling and education between East and West Germany. Section 3 introduces our empirical strategy, and Section 4 our data set. In Section 5, we present our analyses of the impact of schooling and socialization on university students' entrepreneurial intentions. Section 6 concludes by discussing the implications of our work and offers some suggestions for further research.

2. Short History of Schooling in the GDR and the FRG

2.1. The Education System

After World War II, the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) mostly restored the traditional tripartite German schooling system. After four years of primary school, students attend either Gymnasium for nine years, Realschule for six years, or Hauptschule for five years. Access to university was received by passing the Abitur after nine years of Gymnasium. Educational policy is handled on the state level (Bundesland).

Education policies in the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR) were centrally determined by the ministry for national education. Education was organized in a unitary school (Polytechnische Oberschule, POS) that combines primary and secondary school. All students attended POS for ten years (Waterkamp, 1987). A small fraction of students were allowed to continue school for two more years at an extended secondary school (Erweiterte polytechnische Oberschule, EOS), which prepared them for academic studies.4 Access to EOS was not merely based on school achievement but also depended on loyalty to the ruling socialist party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED). Entry criteria involved participation in the socialist party's youth organisation (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ), a declaration of commitment to serve in the army, and the parents' socialist merits. Overall, only 8-12% of the students in a given year could enter EOS. This strict selection process was meant to insure future graduates' loyalty to the state (Stenke 2004).

2.2. School Curricula

The main difference between the FRG's and GDR's school curricula was the GDR's goal to teach communist convictions and conduct to form socialist personalities. This is explicitly stated in the socialist party's 1989 manifesto (p. 67f.). At large, this means that students were not engaged in the process of critical thinking. Instead, students had to internalize socialist dogmas while any question or discussion on the ideology was taboo (cf. Block and Fuchs, 1993). Beyond that, students had to attend specific classes that taught socialist ideologies. The subject Staatsb?rgerkunde (social studies) taught from grade seven on lessons in Marxist and Leninist ideology. From 1978 on, this subject was supplemented by an early military training (Wehrkundeunterricht) for male students. In contrast, social studies in the FRG (Sozialkunde) focused on mechanisms of the democratic process and civil rights. Moreover, the subject economic studies introduced GDR students to socialist production (Judt 1997, pp. 228/29), whereas the FRG curriculum taught mechanisms of a free market economy. Finally, the language education reflected the different political blocs with GDR students learning Russian as compulsory foreign language and FRG students learning English.

Taken together, the GDR school system was designed to educate "socialist" individuals that had a critical attitude towards free market economies and particularly the role of entrepreneurs. When students are taught that entrepreneurs are expropriators time and again, we expect this to sustainably affect their own desire to become an entrepreneur in the future.

4 An indirect way to obtain a university-entrance degree was to combine a 3-year apprenticeship with additional schooling after ten years of POS.

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