Recessions and their influence on entrepreneurship

The goal of this thesis is to give a more practical view about the subject of entrepreneurship and to connect entrepreneurship with recessions. We investigate the influence of a recession on entrepreneurship and what entrepreneurs can do to optimize their outcome once a recession is over. We will answer this question by studying other papers about motivations and problems when becoming an entrepreneur, as well as by analyzing statistics from the Central Bureau of Statistics in the Netherlands, The CBS. We find that even though we hypothesized that entrepreneurship would increase during recessions, we did not find evidence for this. After this we also discuss papers concerning which strategies to use prior and during a recession. This leads us to two different strategies, namely the “recession proofing” and the “recession fighting” strategy. In the paper we will describe what these strategies mean. We end our paper with a conclusion of the findings during our investigation