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What Would You Do If You Suddenly Inherited a Windfall?
Single women are especially likely to start their own business
It is something almost everyone has fantasized about at one point or another: having a big sum of money land in your lap. What would you do if you won the lottery or inherited a nice sum of money? Do you think the answer to that question would depend on your gender and marital status?
Robert Sauer and Tanya Wilson, economists in Great Britain, studied one particular way that people sometimes change their lives after inheriting money — they start their own businesses. Inheriting money can increase anyone’s odds of becoming an entrepreneur if that interests them. But it turns out that, in the UK, the link between inheriting money and starting a business of one’s own is especially strong for single women. For single men, married men, and married women, whether they get an inheritance is less relevant to whether they will start their own business.
Often, when economists want to know how financial resources affect entrepreneurship, they look at the value of the property that people own or their overall wealth. Sauer and Wilson did that, too, but those measures did not matter as much as getting an inheritance. The difference, they believe, is that inherited wealth is more liquid. You get it, and you…
