The long shadow of adolescent friendships: How early peer relationships predict entrepreneurial careers
研究利用两项长期追踪数据，发现青少年时期有自雇朋友的人，成年后更可能成为自雇者，且朋友的自雇形式影响其收入。
Self-employment unfolds within social and developmental contexts, yet research rarely examines how early-life relationships relate to occupational outcomes across the life course. We ask whether adolescent friendships are associated with self-employment in adulthood, linking individuals' later career outcomes to the self-employment of peers they nominated as adolescents. We use two longitudinal datasets: the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which follows respondents from adolescence (1994–1995) into adulthood (2016–2018), and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which follows a cohort from age 18 (1957) to age 65 (2004). Across both panels, having an adolescent friend who is self-employed is associated with a higher likelihood of the individual's own self-employment decades later, net of socioeconomic origins, ability, personality, and adult context. The associations are heterogeneous: friends in incorporated self-employment are linked to higher rates of entry into both incorporated and unincorporated self-employment and to higher midlife earnings, even after conditioning on the individual's own organizational form, whereas friends in unincorporated self-employment show limited or null associations. The association is also strongest within smaller, more concentrated adolescent networks. Because friendships form before careers take shape, these associations may reflect sorting on shared interests and dispositions present when the friendships formed as much as peer influence, a distinction our designs cannot fully resolve. Together, the findings locate the social patterning of self-employment earlier in the life course and show that the form of peers' self-employment is associated with both entry and later economic returns.