The impact of entrepreneurs’ life events on entrepreneurial ventures’ performance

Events in the private lives of entrepreneurs often involve the transition into a new life stage, the birth of a child being a particularly important life event. Building on work-family interface and upper echelons literatures, we investigate the impact of the birth of an entrepreneur’s child on firm performance in the context of privately held firms and test our hypotheses using Swedish data on owner-managed firms in the period between 2004 and 2014. Our results indicate a negative short-term impact of birth on firm performance and suggest that this impact is particularly strong for female entrepreneurs, for the birth of the first kid and for knowledge-intense firms.