Social Identity and Status in Action: The Diffusion of Entrepreneurship

Drawing on social identity theory, we explore the respective roles of social identity and status in the initiation and diffusion of entrepreneurial entry, as a social identity- and status-negotiating behavior. We focus on ethnicity as a social category and source of status and test our theory with a heterogeneous diffusion model on a sample drawn from the Survey of Consumer Finance of U.S. Households. We find that whereas high- status actors...