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...

This paper proposes that risk aversion encourages individuals to invest in balanced skillprofiles, making them more likely to become entrepreneurs. By not having taken this possiblelinkage into account, previous research has underestimated the impacts both of risk aversionand balanced skills on...

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...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer newinsights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreignrisky assets, or “home bias”, from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribesthe...

This paper provides an introduction and overview of my research on the Economics of Language. The approach is that language skills among immigrants and native-born linguistic minorities are a form of human capital. There are costs and benefits associated with this characteristic embodied in the...

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...