Self-employment, management and cognitive reflection revisited: mixed evidence from the UK

The study revisits and attempts to replicate recent findings on how entrepreneurs and managers make decisions – specifically whether entrepreneurs are more intuitive decision-makers and managers more contemplative. Based on data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study we find support for managers being more contemplative, but not for entrepreneurs being more intuitive. We use a different method of capturing decision-making style to those used previously. Our results suggest that the earlier findings in the literature are dependent on the way decision-making style is measured. In particular, it is possible that the measures used before are capturing numeracy alongside decision-making style.