An overview of students’ entrepreneurial intention antecedents

This paper provides an overview of antecedents of the students’ entrepreneurial intention (SEI). A selection, collection, analysis, and systematization of previous studies was carried out to update and reorder the available literature about factors influencing SEI. The analysis reveals the following three sets of antecedents of SEI: 1) factors related to personality traits, 2) contextual/situational factors and 3) factors related to personal background. In addition, this study highlights specific theoretical models used to investigate factors influencing students’ intention to start a new business, such as the theory of planned behaviour model, the entrepreneurial event model and the social cognitive theory. These results contribute to organising the current state of knowledge about the antecedents of SEI and addressing future research by providing a spectrum of variables that can act as a base to develop further analytical models and theoretical constructs about this topic.