Abstract
Although living with parents during college might be viewed as counterproductive for young adults, it may have hidden benefits for entrepreneurship. Drawing on resource mobilization theory, we argue that living at the parental home during college facilitates the mobilization of tangible and intangible resources needed to start a business––what we conceptualize as the ‘infrastructure of the home’ (household-based resources). The analyses of longitudinal data from the population-wide Swedish registries between 1993 and 2019, covering around 376,000 individuals, show that those who lived at the parental home during college are more likely to start a business after graduation. Mechanism analyses show that the effect attenuates following parental death and persists among affluent families, consistent with the infrastructure-of-the-home concept. We rule out alternative explanations related to location, family background, and individual effects. Boundary-condition tests indicate that the effect is stronger for women and increases with the number of siblings, aligning with resource constraints and mobilization capacity. A post-hoc firm-level analysis further shows that new ventures with at least one founder who stayed at the parental home during college are associated with higher new venture performance. The findings are robust to alternative specifications and identification strategies. The study advances our understanding of how a key life course transition—living at or leaving the parental home—relates to entrepreneurship, and it contributes to the resource mobilization literature in entrepreneurship and management by introducing ‘the infrastructure of the home’ as a household-based source of resource advantages governed through informal, non-market family arrangements.