Age and entrepreneurial career success: A review and a meta-analysis

Abstract Entrepreneurship has become an attractive career option for both the young and the old, but age has not been thoroughly examined as a variable of interest among entrepreneurship scholars. In this review, we present 12 theoretical perspectives regarding the effect of age on entrepreneurs' success and our critiques. We then present results of an exploratory meta-analysis with effect sizes from 102 samples. The results show that age has a weak, positive linear relationship with overall entrepreneurial success, but it does exhibit signs of a U-shaped relationship, with the relationship being negative among younger samples but positive among older samples. The positive effect size becomes more pronounced when more females are included in the sample. The effect size of age does not differ by entrepreneurs' tenure running the firm. In terms of the type of success measures, age has a negative effect on growth but a positive effect on subjective success, firm size, and financial success, and no effect on survival. We compare our results with previous meta-analyses on employees' age to show the uniqueness of entrepreneurs' careers and we offer suggestions for future studies. Executive summary The work population is aging, and entrepreneurship has become an attractive career option for both the young and the old. Age has often been included in empirical studies as a control variable to predict entrepreneurs' success, but with inconsistent empirical findings and inadequate attention to age's theoretical role, it is not clear whether older entrepreneurs are as successful as their younger counterparts. The current study has two related components. First, we provided a much-needed review of the alternative theoretical perspectives on the effect of age on entrepreneurial success. These 12 perspectives focused on various age-related mechanisms, namely personal health, rigidity, risk propensity, time's value, discrimination, human capital, social capital, financial capital, emotion, life stages, family obligation, and gender stereotype. We found that explicit theoretical explanations are rare and fragmented for addressing entrepreneurs' age-success relationship. Most of the existing perspectives are simplistic, equivocal, and sometimes contradictory. Guided by the above review, we proposed several research questions about several contingency factors, such as the entrepreneur's life stage, gender, and tenure running the business, which would help us gain a more nuanced understanding of the age-success relationship. Second, we empirically examined the research questions in an exploratory meta-analysis based on 102 independent samples. Indeed, we found more nuanced results than are typically apparent. The results show that age has a weak, positive linear relationship with overall entrepreneurial success ( ρ =0.02), but it does exhibit signs of a U-shaped relationship, with the relationship being negative among younger samples but positive among older samples. The positive effect size becomes more pronounced when more females are included in the sample, suggesting female entrepreneurs' chance of success is higher at later life stages. The effect size of age does not differ by entrepreneurs' tenure running the firm, thus ruling out the possibility that the age-success effect is primarily driven by tenure effect or selection bias. We performed some robustness checks for the meta-analytic results. We found age's effect is not affected by the study's publication year, but the effect differs across the world. In terms of the type of success measures, we found age has a negative effect on growth, but a positive effect on subjective success, firm size, and financial success, and no effect on firm survival. Older entrepreneurs tend to have larger businesses, so older entrepreneurs are “punished” for having a larger denominator in the calculation of growth, putting them in an unfair position if growth is the sole measure of success. We compared our results with previous meta-analyses on employees' age, and one clear distinction is that previous meta-analyses reported an inverted U-shaped relationship between employees' age and overall performance, while our study shows the opposite, U-shaped relationship between entrepreneurs' age and success. This difference is probably due to the fact that entrepreneurial careers involve different resource commitments, job requirements, and success criteria compared to traditional careers, making people at a specific age more likely to succeed in one career but not in the other. Our study shows that researchers need to rethink the theoretical role of age, account for potentially simultaneous operation of theoretical mechanisms, and identify new research directions. We call for more studies to address the unique promises and challenges entrepreneurs in each life stage will face, and we provided some suggestions to increase the rigor of future studies. It is imperative to study the intra-individual aging effect through tracking a large cohort of entrepreneurs over decades with repeated measures of their cognitive intelligence, motivations, role identities, and success. Because male entrepreneurs outnumber female entrepreneurs, it is necessary to oversample female entrepreneurs or seek a matched sample, so that any gender-related differential effects can be demonstrated fully. Because many entrepreneurs work in teams, future studies can compare founding teams of the same age (e.g., college classmates) and teams of different ages, and investigate how members of each type of team can collaborate to maximize their chance of success.