We estimate the impact of a differential treatment of paid employees versus self-employed workers in a public health insurance system on the entry rate into entrepreneurship. In Germany, the public health insurance system is mandatory for most paid employees, but not for the selfemployed, who...

German panel data is used to show that the decrease in life satisfaction caused by an increase in the probability of losing work is higher when self-employed than when paid employed. Further estimations reveal that becoming unemployed reduces self-employed workers ́satisfaction considerably...

Although a meaningful percentage of firms are created out of unemployment and current active labor market policies in Europe often subsidize unemployed individuals to start their own businesses, little is known about the role of unemployment insurance (UI) generosity for selfemployment. By using...

In this paper, we improve upon the Pissarides-Weber (PW) method for estimating tax evasion among the self-employed by utilizing unique register-based consumption measures from the Swedish and Finnish mandatory registers for pleasure boats. Our main contributions are twofold: i) The PW method...

This paper estimates income tax underreporting for the case of Germany, by income category and along the income distribution. Comparing weighted samples of survey and tax data, we find patterns that are in line with the literature: Average income from self-employment and from rent and lease in...

Although a relevant share of firms is created out of unemployment and current active labor market policies in Europe often subsidize unemployed individuals to start their own businesses, little is known about the role of unemployment insurance (UI) generosity for self-employment. By using...

In response to strong revenue and income losses that a large share of the self-employed faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the...

Business creation is economically important, and unemployment precedes the creation of a substantial share of new firms. Yet, most research has focused on analyzing the effects of unemployment insurance policies on re-employment outcomes, ignoring self-employment. In this paper, we analyze how...