The impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepeneurship competencies and intentions: an evaluation of the Junior Achievement Student Mini-Company Program

This paper analyzes the impact of a leading entrepreneurship education program on students’ entrepreneurship competencies and intentions using an instrumental variables approach in a difference-in-differences framework. We exploit that the program was offered to students at one location of a school but was not offered to students at another location of the same school. Location choice (and thereby treatment) is instrumented by the relative distance of locations to parents’ place of residence. The results show that the program does not have the intended effects: the effect on students’ self-assessed entrepreneurial skills is insignificant and the effect on the intention to become an entrepreneur is even significantly negative.