We argue that formal schooling and wage-work experience are complementary types
of human capital for entrepreneurs. Strong empirical support is found for this hypothesis
as the interaction term between schooling and actual wage-work experience enters
positively and significantly in a Mincer equation, whereas the effect of schooling in the
absence of wage-work experience is insignificant. These results are extremely robust
towards more flexible specifications, including fixed-effects estimations dealing with
unobserved heterogeneity. For wage workers, the interaction term is negligible, confirming
that the complementarity is a distinct characteristic of entrepreneurial human
capital.
