Using the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, I examine how immigrants perform relative to natives in activities likely to increase U.S. productivity, according to the type of visa on which they first entered the United States. Immigrants who first entered on a student/trainee visa or a...

This paper analyses the impact of a change in Australia’s immigration policy, introduced inthe mid-1990s, on migrants’ probability of becoming entrepreneurs. The policy changeconsists of stricter entry requirements and restrictions to welfare entitlements. The resultsindicate that those who...

There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision towork in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as apuzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee.Information on income...

Using a large representative German data set and various concepts of self-employment, thispaper tests the “jack-of-all-trades” view of entrepreneurship by Lazear (AER 2004).Consistent with its theoretical assumptions we find that self-employed individuals performmore tasks and that their...

Drivers of entrepreneurial entry are investigated in this study by examining how entry intosmall-business ownership is shaped by industry-specific constraints. The human- andfinancial-capital endowments of potential entrepreneurs entering firms in various industriesare shown to differ...

Using two Dutch labour force surveys, employment assimilation of immigrants is examined. We observe marked differences between immigrants by source country. Non-western immigrants never reach parity with native Dutch. Even second generation immigrants never fully catch up...

Using the large-scale German Socio-Economic Panel, this note reports direct empirical evidence for significant correlations between risk aversion and labour market outcomes (full-time employment, temporary agency work, fixed-term contracts, employer change, quits, training, wages, and job...

We provide, for the first time, comparative evidence of the impact of various types of extreme events – natural disasters, terrorism, and violent conflicts – on the perceptions of entrepreneurs concerning some key entrepreneurial issues – such as fear of failure in starting a business...

Recent human capital theories predict that labor market frictions and product market competition influence firm-sponsored training. Using matched worker-firm data from Dutch manufacturing, our paper empirically assesses the validity of these predictions. We find that a decrease in labor market...

This paper studies willingness to become an entrepreneur depending on an individual’s composition of human and social capital. Our theoretical analysis is an extension of Lazear’s (2005) jack-of-all-trades theory. Our primary implication is that it is not individuals with a higher level of...