Entrepreneurial Activity in a Crisis Context: Does Fear Affect Students’ Intention to Start a Business?

This paper examines the determinants of the entrepreneurial intention of business students in a specific crisis context, respectively the COVID-19 pandemic. One aim of this study was to evaluate whether the negative feelings associated with a crisis, in our case the fear of COVID-19 impacts the entrepreneurial intention, among other factors. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the few papers testing models that describe the entrepreneurial intention in a crisis context. This is the only paper including the fear of COVID-19 in such a model. The results are based on a survey with 242 respondents from an important higher educational institution in the Eastern European area. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to analyze the data and test our hypotheses. The findings show that the entrepreneurial intention is significantly determined by students’ entrepreneurial competencies, their personal attitudes toward being an entrepreneur, and the perceived behavioral control. The entrepreneurial competencies are significantly influenced by the perceived competence of the lecturing team and to a certain degree by the perceived relevance and adequacy of the curriculum. Our results show that the fear of COVID-19 does not significantly affect students’ intention to open their own firm. Accordingly, this paper widens the literature regarding the entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial education. Officials and university managers can better understand what impacts the students’ intention to open a firm. Lastly, our finding regarding the lack of influence of fear of COVID-19 on the entrepreneurial intention can be extended in other crisis contexts.