Social Capital and Nascent Entrepreneurship

This study examines the link between social capital and (nascent) entrepreneurship with social capital as the explanatory factor. First, the leading studies on the link between social capital and (nascent) entrepreneurship are discussed and expectations for the empirical part of this paper are formed. Subsequently, the association between social capital and nascent entrepreneurship is studied empirically, knowing an entrepreneur is taken as the proxy variable for social capital. For this empirical part of the study, data were taken from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) in 2010. Individuals living in the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom have been selected with a random sample of at least 2,000 individuals in each country. The conclusion of this study, based on both the existing literature and the empirical part in this paper, is that an individual’ social capital in the form of knowing an entrepreneur increases the chance of becoming an nascent entrepreneur, having entrepreneurial intentions and having entrepreneurial self-efficacy.