Policies that seek to encourage the supply of entrepreneurs have become standard in the arsenal of most countries. The suggestion that more entrepreneurship leads to more economic growth has acquired the status of stylised fact; occasionally conditioned on the ‘quality’ of entrepreneurial efforts or on institutional development. However, a central feature of entrepreneurship is the high rate at which new ventures fail. As Aldrich and Martinez (2001) noted, “[a]lthough the propensity to entrepreneurship varies from one society to another, a universal constant is that no matter how many entrepreneurs emerge, most do not succeed in creating lasting organizations”. Simply put, most entrepreneurs experience entrepreneurship as an episode, or episodes, and not as a career. Indeed, past research has suggested that almost half of all adults in developed economies experience periods of self-employment (Reynolds and White, 1997). The corollary is that the number of former entrepreneurs is likely to be far greater than the number of current entrepreneurs at any given time.

This project is premised on the contention that fully understanding the returns to entrepreneurship requires consideration of the micro-consequences of episodes of entrepreneurship for this larger population of ex-entrepreneurs. Existing work on the returns to entrepreneurship has compared current entrepreneurs with non-entrepreneurs and rationalised low expected pecuniary returns with reference to the non-pecuniary benefits associated with entrepreneurship (e.g. independence and autonomy) that, in turn, signal greater subjective well-being. However, a failure to recognise the turnover and turbulence in entrepreneurial populations is likely to overstate the gains to individuals and fails to explicate the entirety of the entrepreneurial process.