Using the Canadian Labour Force Survey, we document the short-term impact of COVID-19 on self-employed individuals in Canada, which we interpret as small business owners. We document an important decrease in business ownership between February 2020 and May 2020 (-14.8 percent for incorporated...

Canadian employers are largely small businesses. Their relevance for job creation and labour demand is integral for policymakers concerned with adverse labour market outcomes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) we document how the self-employed,...

Microcredit program, originating in Bangladesh in the late 1970s, has played an important role to meet the financing needs of the impoverished communities around the world. While the successes and failures of microcredit in lifting the poor out of poverty have been recorded in a wide array of...

Estimated labor force participation rates among free women in the pre-Civil War period were exceedingly low. This is due, in part, to cultural or societal expectations of the role of women and the lack of thorough enumeration by Census takers. This paper develops an augmented labor force...

We examine supply-side determinants of transition from the wage and salary sector to selfemployment of women and men living Poland. The empirical analysis is made possible due to a unique and under explored longitudinal survey - Social Diagnosis - that contains rare indicators such as job...

The paper investigates whether self-employment represents a way to reduce overeducation and improve labour market matching, in a comparative analysis between immigrants and natives. Using the EU Labour Force Survey for the year 2012, and controlling for a list of demographic characteristics and...

We address the impact of declining migration on the measurement of labor market health. We first document an historically significant decline in the growth rate of the U.S. foreign born population since 2000. A decomposition shows that nearly two-thirds of the decline can be attributed to...

Rising self-employment rates in U.S. tax data that are absent in survey data have led to speculation that tax records capture a rise in new "gig" work that surveys miss. Drawing on the universe of IRS tax returns, we show that trends in firm-reported payments to "gig" and other contract workers...

There is a widespread policy view that a lack of job opportunities at home is a key reason for migration, accompanied by suggestions of the need to spend more on creating these opportunities so as to reduce migration. Self-employment is widespread in poor countries, and faced with a lack of...