economic activity in the form of higher entrepreneurship. Using administrative census data linked to the complete formal … created include both employer and non-employer firms and are relatively low on assets. In panel data specifications, the …

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 …