On 16^th September, Faculty of Finance at City University of Macau organized the First Finance Salon (2023-2024) at the Taipa campus. The salon was delivered by Dr. Rong Zhu from Flinders University, Australia. His research paper titled “From Entry to Persistence: Socio-Emotional Skills and Entrepreneurial Profiles”. Against the backdrop of entrepreneurs’ role in driving key economic indicators and recent trends in declining entrepreneurial activity, this article examines the explanatory power of socio-emotional skills for entrepreneurial behavior. Using nationally representative panel data from Australia, the article evaluates the empirical relationship between socio-emotional traits and the decision to initially transition into entrepreneurship and then to persist as an entrepreneur. Considering a comprehensive set of socio-emotional skills including the Big-Five personality traits, locus of control, risk and time preferences, and trust, this article conclude that risk tolerance has a positive and significant relationship with entrepreneurial entry and persistence. By contrast, the roles of other soft skills are much smaller and less consistent for the status and time profiles of entrepreneurship. To fully characterize the validity of these findings, the article performs omitted variable bias and bounds analysis to evaluate the robustness of the results.

Dr. Zhu is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Business, Government and Law at Flinders University in Australia. His research interests include labor, education, and health economics, as well as applied micro-econometrics. He has published papers in the Economic Journal, Journal of Health Economics, and Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization and others.

During this Finance Salon, Dr. Zhu had a friendly academic interaction with teachers and students of the Faculty of Finance. The Finance Salon organized by Faculty of Finance at City University of Macau serves as a platform for exchanging academic ideas and fostering academic awareness. With finance as the main focus, we invite senior scholars/experts from academia and the financial industry to engage in research discussions on cutting-edge topics and share industry development trends, aiming to provide a fresh academic experience and thinking model for CityU students and members of the faculty. Through activities like the Finance Salon, we hope to offer graduate students a better academic platform, encouraging further exploration and research on academic issues.