Self-employed individuals, time use, and earnings

This paper analyzes the time allocation of self-employed men and women compared to men and women in paid employment and the impact of house-work on earnings of self-employed individuals using data from two German datasets. Self-employed women spend more time on housework activities and self-employed men spend more time on market work than their paid counterparts. While descriptive statistics and pooled OLS earnings regressions show a negative impact of time spent on housework on earnings, fixed-effects earnings regressions show only a negative impact on monthly earnings of self-employed men. This impact disappears after controlling for potential endogeneity via instrumental variable estimators.