Abstract
Building from human capital theory, we investigate the relative financial payoffs to prior entrepreneurial experience inside versus outside the entrepreneurial context. Testing from the sample of 26,235 entrepreneurs who were at risk of making a career choice between serial entrepreneurship or wage employment, we find that greater prior entrepreneurial experience leads to a higher financial payoff in wage employment than in serial entrepreneurship, implying that the financial payoffs to prior entrepreneurial experience can be extended, and much higher, outside the entrepreneurial context. Our findings hold a host of novel implications for understanding the motivation of entrepreneurship and also add to the research of serial entrepreneurship.