University students from business-owning families face two distinct entrepreneurial futures, founding an independent venture or succeeding the family firm. This study aims to theorize next-generation career-intention formation as the institutionally conditioned allocation of family human capital between two rival logics and ask how de-embedding resources and family embedding forces shape the two intentions and whether their effects depend on a country’s market development.
Multilevel models are estimated on 35,553 next-generation students nested in 66 countries from the 2025 Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit students’ Survey (GUESSS). Founding and succession intentions are modeled with random intercepts by country; cross-level interactions test whether de-embedding effects are moderated by a country’s institutional development, measured both by a binary market-type classification (IMF advanced-economies scheme) and by a continuous index of log GDP per capita (purchasing-power parity, World Bank).
The two intentions are distinct and governed by different logics: founding is dispositional; succession is driven by parental pressure and family-firm performance. External work experience de-embeds students toward founding, and this effect is invariant across market types. Individual entrepreneurial disposition, however, de-embeds students toward founding significantly weaklier in emerging markets, where family embedding forces dominate the allocation.
The design is cross-sectional and based on self-reports; market type is a coarse institutional proxy. The findings of this study imply that the institutional context conditions which individual resources can reallocate the next generation’s entrepreneurial agency.
Family firms in emerging markets cannot rely on the next generation’s disposition to divert it toward independent founding; succession rests on active family expectation and firm performance. External experience outside the firm is a genuine de-embedding lever everywhere.
By jointly modeling founding and succession intentions across 66 countries, this study extends socioemotional-wealth reasoning to the pre-succession intention stage, specifies a human-capital-based de-embedding mechanism and shows that its dispositional channel is institutionally contingent, a contribution on, not merely from, emerging markets.
