We provide new evidence on sexual orientation, entrepreneurship, and firm survival using Swedish population register data linked to business registry data from 1995 to 2020. Over this period, we study over 19,000 individuals who ever entered a legal same-sex union and compare their entrepreneurship and firm level outcomes with individuals exclusively in different-sex unions. We find that sexual minority men are 7.8% less likely than comparable heterosexual men to be entrepreneurs, while sexual minority women are 4.8% more likely than comparable heterosexual women to be entrepreneurs. Both differences are statistically significant. We also provide the first evidence regarding the survival of sexual minority founded firms compared to firms founded by heterosexual individuals. Our results show that firms founded by sexual minority women fail more quickly than observably similar firms founded by heterosexual women, with no significant survival difference observed for sexual minority men. We explore the role of several external and internal factors that may explain these underlying patterns and find that lack of a ‘trapped market’ may contribute to the higher failure rate of firms founded by sexual minority women. We also find suggestive support for a role of romantic partners in explaining differences in firm survival experienced by sexual minority women compared to heterosexual women.

我们使用与 1995 年至 2020 年商业登记数据相关联的瑞典人口登记数据提供有关性取向、创业和公司生存的新证据。在此期间，我们研究了超过 19,000 名曾经进入合法同性结合的个人，并将他们的创业精神和公司层面的结果与仅在异性结合中的个人进行了比较。我们发现，性少数男性成为企业家的可能性比同类异性恋男性低 7.8%，而性少数女性成为企业家的可能性比同类异性恋女性高 4.8%。这两个差异在统计上都是显著的。我们还提供了关于性少数群体创立的公司与异性恋者创立的公司相比生存的第一项证据。我们的结果表明，由性少数女性创立的公司比由异性恋女性创立的明显相似的公司倒闭得更快，性少数男性没有观察到显着的生存差异。我们探讨了可能解释这些潜在模式的几个外部和内部因素的作用，并发现缺乏“受困市场”可能会导致性少数群体女性创立的公司失败率更高。我们还发现，在解释性少数群体女性与异性恋女性在公司生存率方面的差异方面，浪漫伴侣的作用得到了暗示性支持。