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...

This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial endeavors of immigrants and natives in Germany. We pay closer attention to Turks, since they are the largest immigrant group with a strong entrepreneurial tradition, and the self-employed Turks in Germany represent about 70% of all Turkish entrepreneurs...

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...

The paper aims to test whether a firm’s provision of training depends on the intake quality of trainees. While a firm may just treat each trainee equally, independent of his or her intake quality, firms may alternatively also provide more training to less able individuals or focus on the most...

The amendment to the German Trade and Crafts Code in 2004 offers a natural experiment to asses the causal effects of this reform on the probabilities of being self-employed and transition into and out of self-employment, using cross-sections (2002-2006) of German microcensus data. This study...