self-employment to 23%. This same time period also witnessed declines in "hometown" local entrepreneurship and the … probability of the self-employed being among top earners. Using 2016 data, we show that high startup capital requirements are …

Rising self-employment rates in U.S. tax data that are absent in survey data have led to speculation that tax records … are a major driver of discrepancies between self-employment trends in self-reported and third-party reported data. Our … findings suggest caution is warranted before deferring to self-reported tax data over other data sources when measuring labor …